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MRS. DRUMMOND’S 
VOCATION 

33 ^ 

By 

MARK RYCE 


r 


NEW YORK 

THE VAIL COMPANY 



Copyright, 1911 
By WILLIAM HEINEMANN 



©CI.A2928 J 1 


MRS. DRUMMOND’S 
VOCATION 











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I 





MRS. DRUMMOND’S 
VOCATION 


1 

Into the brooding heat of an August after- 
noon, into the hot quiet of a small sun-filled 
street, rang a peal of young feminine laugh- 
ter. 

It gurgled, it rose, it almost glittered as 
it soared; it bubbled, and broke, and show- 
ered, silvery, into silence. 

Madame Coutreau, the green-grocer op- 
posite, who sat sewing in the moist dusk of 
her little shop, shook her head and smiled as 
if against her will. 

“Pardieu, fruit is dear and customers 
scarce, to say nothing of Anatole breaking 
his leg — but when the little one laughs — one 
laughs with her!” 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

A ragpicker, a mouldy man with a sour, 
sunken mouth, held up his head alertly and 
paused in his task of poking in the foul gut- 
ter, as the sound of the laugh reached him. 

.“Tiens, one would say music, ” he mut- 
tered. 

And Samuel Drummond, nonconformist 
missionary, on his way from Clapham to 
China, set down his cup of some strange in- 
fusion given to him as tea, and looked into 
the dimness at the back of the cafe whence 
the sound came. 

The cafe was a humble one, the street 
that of Faid’herbe, the town Boulogne. 

There were half-a-dozen marble-topped 
tables and two dozen iron chairs ; the 
wooden floor had recently been sprinkled 
with water ; the walls flared forth advertise- 
ments of Amer Picon, Oxygenee Cusenier 
and other varieties of liquid refreshments. 
One of these pictures, that of a scantily-clad 
damsel, drinking a glass of some bubbly yel- 
low fluid, to the excellency of which her 
ecstatic smile testified, had offended Samuel 


2 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

Drummond, and his back was turned to 
it. 

At the back of the room was a small bar, 
behind which, in a high chair, sat an old 
woman with a scrap of black lace on her 
white hair, sound asleep. 

The knowledge that the patronne dormait 
was brought home to the solitary customer 
of that early hour by the frowsy waiter who 
produced the tea demanded by Drummond 
as a concession to a sudden feeling of faint- 
ness, experienced as he reached the cafe. 
The patronne, undisturbed by the advent of 
the customer, slept on. 

The laugh had come into the silence like 
a peal of bells, or the tossing of a scarlet 
flower, or a flash of light. It came through 
a half-opened door to the left of the sleeping 
old woman. 

Drummond made another attempt to 
drink his tea, which was beyond conception 
nasty, his eyes fixed on the door. 

Then, as the frowsy waiter lounged at 
one of the two tables that stood on the side- 
3 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

walk by the entrance, with its dusty sentinel 
bay-trees, and the patronne slept on undis- 
turbed, the half-open door opened, and a 
small black poodle minced affectedly out on 
its hind legs, a wide white hat tied on its 
head. 

Absurdly vain of its unusual headgear, 
the creature peacocked towards Drummond, 
its eyes plainly appealing for praise. 

The young man watched it gravely. It 
was extremely funny, but he resented funny 
things. 

The dog approached with a delicacy of 
equilibrium that would have been noticeable 
even in a really trained canine performer, 
and then, his eyes straying from it to the 
door, Samuel Drummond beheld Lily Crane. 

What he saw was a child of seventeen in 
a faded violet cotton frock that was too 
tight for the graceful buddings of her fig- 
ure; round and round her little head her 
bright hair was bound in the tidy French 
way, but it broke into curls and tendrils on 
a brow as white as paper, and delicately blue- 
4 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

veined. Her eyes were large, and the col- 
our, it seemed to Drummond, of honey in the 
sun. He did not notice her nose, for her 
red, thin mouth, dimpled and short-lipped, 
caught and held his attention — held it till 
the last hour of his life. Its coral-coloured 
lips were as smooth as satin and the minute 
muscles of it lookted strong. It seemed to 
him that she could, if she wished, move it in 
a million different ways. And the lift of 
the upper lip as she saw him, and stood still, 
made his excellent heart turn over in his 
breast. For a second she hesitated, as if 
poised for flight, and then, as the poodle 
reached him and squatted down in conse- 
quential expectance of a toothsome reward 
for his cleverness, her mouth quivered, 
broadened and opened, and again the clear, 
delicious, cool laugh rang out into the quiet. 

“Viens, Folichon, viens, vilaine bete,” she 
called, as the laugh ended in a little upward 
gurgle that brought an answering quiver to 
the Englishman’s grim lips, “je ne savais 

_ » 

pas . . . 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

She looked, as she stood there, dimpling 
and shy, like the incarnation of lovely things 
he had never hitherto appreciated. He 
thought vaguely of spring in the country, 
of running water, of starlight, of roses. 
And then the sleeping old woman opened 
her very black eyes and said something short 
and sharp in French, a pernicious and im- 
moral tongue of which Drummond was 
guiltless. 

The young girl’s face changed suddenly 
to one of expressionless submission, and she 
withdrew without looking again at Drum- 
mond. 

Then the old woman, to his surprise, ad- 
dressed him in fairly good English. 

“She is a child,” she said severely, as if 
the irruption of the child in question had 
been his fault. “ She is only seventeen.” 

“I think,” he answered, “that she did not 
know anyone was here. The dog came in 
first. It — it had a hat on.” 

He blushed at the absurdity of the phrase. 
He was as serious a young man as any ever 
6 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

sent by wise men in Clapham to convert the 
heathen. 

The old woman nodded. “It was a — a — 
what says one? — a shoke. Yes, it was a 
shoke. She would make to laugh Henri, — 
the gargon.” 

As she spoke, she descended from her 
perch and came from behind the counter; a 
short old woman, dressed in shabby, very 
clean black, a scrap of lace fastened under 
her chin by an amethyst brooch. Time had 
spread her figure and loosened the flesh of 
her face, which hung in undulating folds, 
softly white, but it had not quenched the se- 
verity of her black eyes nor the authorita- 
tive note in her voice. A maitresse femme, 
Madame Louvrier. 

“She is your daughter?" suggested the 
impaled Drummond, one hand to his breast, 
as if to feel the arrow that had pierced him. 

“My granddaughter. Ah, Monsieur, — 
I can see that Monsieur is serious, — it is dif- 
ficult to bring up a young thing like that in 
a cafe. My clientele is of the most respect- 

7 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

able, des hommes ranges, tous, and Henri is 
a dragon — but yes, a dragon. Also the 
door is defended to her. Nevaire does she 
come into the cafe, and yet — it is not the 
atmosphere for a young girl.” 

“No,” assented the missionary, fixing a 
resentful eye on the hussy in the picture. 

“And yet the cafe; it is my life; without 
it we must die of ’ungaire.” The old woman 
spread out her thin brown hands in a ges- 
ture of resignation. 

What had led to her outbreak to this 
strange man is not known. It is certain 
that to her he seemed a gentleman, too far 
above her own position to be looked on as a 
possible help in her troubles. His sober 
black clothes, his depressed face probably 
gave her a feeling of confidence. 

At all events, when he met her half-way 
in her mood of expansion, the good woman 
at his request, sat down and “went back to 
the beginning.” 

Drummond would in his present mood 
have believed whatever fantastic tale she 
8 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

chose to offer him, but Madame Louvrier 
was perfectly truthful and her narrative 
veracious in its slightest detail. 

Her only daughter had married an Eng- 
lishman, a traveller for a “Maison de Whis- 
key,” whom the exigencies of business had 
brought to the cafe du Perroquet Bleu. 

This man, one Oliver Crane, died when 
his little daughter was three years old, and 
then the widow took the wrong road. She 
was beautiful, ah ga oui, but she was frivo- 
lous and vain, and in the end had gone off 
with a mercier de la rue Victor Hugo, who 
had, oh horror, already a wife. 

She died two years later in Paris, never, 
in the interim, having seen her little girl 
who had remained with her grandparents at 
the Blue Parrot. 

“Then my ’usban died and me voila, a 
middle-aged widow and the little Lily. God 
has been good to me, and so far all is well, 
but oh, Monsieur, to bring up a girl at all 
one needs the eyes of a lynx, the eyes of a — 
a — ” 


9 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

“Hawk,” suggested Drummond absently. 

“Yes, a ’awk. And here in the rue Faid’- 
herbe, in a cafe — it is difficult ! She is good, 
the child, as good as brown bread, but she 
loves to laugh — too much. She begins to 
look in the glass, — soon she will be a woman 
and she has no dot, and I am old. God is 
good.” 

The evil in the tale had embarrassed, and 
tied the tongue of Samuel Drummond, but 
at the mention of God his face cleared as at 
the name of a familiar friend. He and God 
thoroughly understood each other! 

This he explained to Madame Louvrier 
and the two simple, rigid natures expanded 
slightly towards each other. 

To them both, God was a monstrous tyrant 
devoid of all tenderness, yet coldly just. 
They feared loving Him, but on the other 
hand, they loved fearing Him. 

And the laugh of Lily, ringing in Drum- 
mond’s memory, brought a look to his face 
that the old woman’s shrewd eyes did not 
fail to see. 


10 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

It was five o’clock when he left the cafe 
and then he stammered to her not good-bye 
but au revoir. 


II 


There was a friture for supper that even- 
ing in the little room behind the cafe of the 
Blue Parrot, — delicate fish like baby soles; 
there was a ragout of beef, stewed until it 
was a delicious parody of game; there was 
a salad whose bowl had indisputably been 
rubbed with garlic; there were little square 
cheeses, condensed cream that melted in the 
mouth; there was a sweet omelette soaked, 
alas ! in rum ; a meal such as Samuel Drum- 
mond had never before partaken of. 

And there was Lily in her best white frock 
of coarse nun's veiling trimmed with lumpy 
bows of cheap ribbon — a garment fit for 
Venus herself, Drummond would have 
thought, had the Improper Goddess been a 
fit inmate for his chaste imagination. 

Madame Louvrier, fired with the excite- 
ment of the great idea suggested to her by 
12 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

something in Drummond’s face, had assumed 
a demeanour of the greatest dignity, verg- 
ing on stiffness. The Anglais was angular 
and plain and awkward, eh bien oui, mon 
Dieu, but he was, it was plain to see, amou- 
reux fou of the little one; and something 
about his clothes, his boots, his hideous silver 
watch chain gave the old woman a comfort- 
ing confidence that he was well-to-do. 

For the first time Lily was allowed to 
laugh and chatter in the presence of a man. 
The laugh that so terrified her austere 
grandmother was, plainly, a powerful at- 
traction to the Anglais. Therefore, let the 
child laugh ! 

Madame Louvrier wore in honour of the 
occasion a lace collar and a long gold chain 
from which hung a little gold cross, worn 
thin with age. This horrible symbol caught 
the nonconformist’s eye as he was eating 
his second delicately fried fish. 

“You are a papist?” he asked, faintly, but 
with the severity he judged obligatory on 
him. 


13 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

“Papist? Mais — what is dat?” 

He pointed at the cross as he might have 
pointed, shrinkingly, at a leper. “Catho- 
lic?” 

Madame Louvrier reflected for a moment, 
and then she understood. 

“Ah! qa, oui. Ah, yes, I am Catholique, 
naturally. And you, Monsieur?” 

He tried to explain to her what he was, 
but his voice faltered. His duty was to go 
at once, and never return. 

“Vous n’aimez done pas la sainte Eglise? 
You like not ze Church?” 

“It is the Scarlet Woman of Babylon,” he 
returned doggedly, his eyes half closing, “the 
mother of all evil. I — I had not thought of 
that.” 

Lily was giving bits of bread to the oblig- 
ing Folichon, who sat up like a gentleman 
beside her. The conversation plainly bored 
her. At her Drummond gave one glance. 
He would go as soon as common politeness 
would allow him. 

But Madame Louvrier, her sharp black 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

eyes half hidden under their wrinkled lids, 
like those of an ancient crocodile, spoke 
softly. 

“Ah, oui, I understand," she said; “you are 
of the new religion — vous etes Calviniste. 
My daughter's poor 'usband, Mistaire 
Crane, — he too was of that religion. Very 
sombre I call it, — sans gaite, not gay like 
ours, but what will you? He was born to 
it. And when Lily came, he insist, oh, but 
furiously, that she too should be Calviniste. 
It was triste, vous comprenez, for my poor 
Paul and me, but" — with a shrug — “she was 
3 is child, Crane's, and — que voulez vous ?" 

Of this skilfully delivered speech Drum- 
mond gathered only the main fact. Lily was 
a Calvinist. The saving grace of this truth 
purged from his attentive mind any reali- 
sation of the horror of the old woman's atti- 
tude towards a lack of gaiety in his religion. 

“Oh, then she" — he stammered, in his re- 
lief draining his glass, hitherto untouched, 
of red wine. 

“But yes. She is of your religion, poor 
IS 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

cherished one. Lily, Monsieur interests 
himself,” she went on in French, “for your 
soul.” 

Lily wiped her fingers, just half swallowed 
by the poodle, and smiled her dazzling smile 
across the table. 

“Ah, yes?” she asked Drummond, “it in- 
terests you, souls?” 

The strong wine had warmed the mission- 
ary’s imagination. “Your soul interests 
me,” he declared, “more than anything else 
in the world.” ✓ 

For a moment her honey-coloured eyes 
glowed at him; then they dropped and were 
hidden. 

It was what her grandmother had long 
called her naughtiest trick. Half uncon- 
scious still, it yet, even in her youngest 
maidenhood, savoured of coquetry. Often 
had Madame Louvrier hesitated whether to 
respect the innocent half or chastise the 
coquettish half of the little by-play, but she 
had always put off her decision. 

And now, as she ate her smoking ragout, 
16 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

she rejoiced in her heart. For Drummond 
actually blushed under the glance Lily gave 
him. 

Madame Louvrier was a thoroughly good 
woman and a devout Catholic. But she was 
afraid of and for her granddaughter, and if 
Heaven and the Blessed Virgin had sent a 
heretic husband to the girl, it was indeed a 
blessing that they had sent him before her 
possibly innate characteristics had had time 
to develope. 

At the back of the house there was a small 
square of moth-eaten-looking grass in which 
grew a bony and nearly leafless tree. There 
was also a tonnelle on which crept a de- 
pressed creeper adorned with half-a-dozen 
pale mauve flowers. Under this little bower 
the small party drank its coffee. Drum- 
mond, on the understanding that it was 
strictly a temperance drink, took a small 
glass of some fiery brown fluid that had the 
immediate effect of reducing any obstacle 
suggested to his bliss by his brain, to filmy 
nonsense to be laughed away. 

17 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

There was a moon, a remarkably large 
moon of a deep orange hue. Drummond had 
never before been in such sympathy with 
moonlight. 

Presently Madame Louvrier rose and went 
to her place in the cafe. 

“Grand’mere lives in the cafe,” observed 
Lily, dipping bits of sugar into her coffee 
and transferring them, dripping wet, to her 
mouth. “She love it.” 

“And you?” 

“Me? No. It is dull, very dull; I can’t 
do with it.” There was a decided cockney 
inflection to her pretty, broken English ; she 
said “cawn’t.” 

“And what do you like?” 

“Me? Oh, I like to go to the marche 
where there are many people, and to Mass 
on Sundays — ” 

“To Mass? But you are a Protestant!” 
At the horror in his voice she looked 
up. 

“Protestant! Yes, my father was, and so 
am I. But, — I go to Mass always with 
18 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

grand'mere. Que voulez-vous? It is gay 
and I like the incense." 

“But you are a Protestant," he insisted, 
gazing at her. And she laughed softly. It 
sounded like rippling water to him, and her 
eyes held light as golden as that of the moon. 


Ill 


They were married three days later by a 
minister from near Leeds, whom Drum- 
mond had met on the beach and accosted as 
a brother. 

Mr. Billings, a worn old man with a large 
wen on his glossy brow, lived as it were in 
a cloud of the aroma of peppermint, a rem- 
edy supposed to be efficacious against the 
dyspepsia that for many years had held him 
in its clutches. He had come abroad for 
his holiday, but the horrors of France had 
proved to him such that his courage had 
failed him here at her very edge, and he was 
installed in a small hotel on the quai, where 
he clung pathetically to a waiter who spoke 
English, and where the beefsteak was really 
red inside. 

He told his story to Drummond and to- 
gether they sat on the sands whereon French 
20 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

ladies, frisky though fat, skipped seawards 
in short skirts, and dallied with the fringe 
of the Channel with little shrieks of amused 
fear. 

“I wish I had gone to Hoylake,” Mr. Bil- 
lings declared, “but I have always wished 
to come abroad, and when my dear wife died, 
last November, my health broke down, and 
the doctor said a complete change would do 
me good. It is a rich connection, ours, and 
they got up a subscription to give me this 
’oliday. I don’t know,” he concluded with 
deep gloom, “that they’ll like my tarrying 
here , but I reely ’aven’t the courage to go 
on.” 

“The air is good here,” suggested 
Drummond, consolingly; “it ought to help 
you.” 

“The little girls’ skirts are so short,” pur- 
sued Mr. Billings, dusting a peppermint 
lozenge which had accumulated a coating of 
fluff in his pocket ; “they seem all legs. And 
the only difference one can perceive between 
them and the very little boys, is that the girls 
21 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

have lace edgings to their drawers. One 
doesn’t quite see why.” 

Drummond did not laugh, because he was 
not in the least amused. The old minister 
appeared to him to be as worthy as he, in 
spite of his peculiarities, undoubtedly was, 
and the younger man was sorry for him. 

“It’ll cheer you up to have something to 
do,” he suggested ; “you didn’t expect a wed- 
ding here, did you?” 

“No, no, I can’t say I did. It’s a strange 
thing to do, to marry a French girl.” When 
he sucked his lozenge he, or it, made a loud 
noise. 

“She isn’t French. Her father was an 
Englishman — name of Crane — she is a Cal- 
vinist.” 

And thus it was arranged. 

Lily, one bright morning, became Mrs. 
Samuel Drummond, and a breakfast was 
partaken of in the garden behind the cafe. 

By means of laths laid over the seven-foot 
garden walls, and freshly cut Virginian 
creepers spread over the laths, a certain 
22 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

amount of shade was ensured to the com- 
pany. The breakfast was excellent, and old 
Mr. Billings at one period was moved to 
tears by emotions of various sorts. 

Madame Louvrier, looking rather hand- 
some in a russet-coloured silk, nodded ap- 
provingly when Drummond refused wine. 

“You have reason, my friend," she said. 
“Lily too has never tasted it. We others — 
we French — it is different, but she is Eng- 
leesh and it is better she should drink noth- 
ing but water." 

Lily's father, Drummond knew, had looked 
too frequently on spirits when they were 
golden, and he had already written to his 
parents at Clapham that his bride was a tee- 
totaller. 

Under her filmy veil, Lily's beauty was re- 
markable. And her shrewd old grand- 
mother saw with satisfaction that the child's 
eyes were often fixed on Drummond's face. 

“He will mould her," Madame Louvrier 
thought, draining her glass; “thanks to the 
Blessed Virgin that he has got her while she 
23 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

is so young. He is a fine young man, too, 
with his great nose and his big shoulders. 
Me, I like a man with a nose.” 

“Messieurs et Dames,” — the uncle Scipion 
had risen and struck his glass against a bot- 
tle to call the company to order. “Messieurs 
et Dames.” 

The uncle Scipion, a brother of the late 
M. Louvrier, was a small man with a re- 
markably large, black moustache that lay 
across his little wizened face like the fire-end 
of a poker. He was a wine-dealer in the 
champagne, and, it was rumoured, rich. 

He had given Lily five hundred francs for 
her trousseau, and felt in return entitled to 
a few words. 

The few words lasted twenty-two minutes. 
Lily yawned, her little pink tongue curling 
up like a puppy’s; Madame Louvrier, her 
eyes with much politeness fixed on the uncle 
Scipion’s face, mentally reviewed her pur- 
chase of the trousseau and rather regretted 
after all that she had changed her mind 
about the dark blue travelling dress. “The 
24 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

red and gold galloon was very chic/’ she re- 
flected. 

A fly objected to the orator’s oratory and 
buzzed rudely round his moist bald head. 
Henri, the waiter, smartened up for the occa- 
sion, shoo’d at the fly with his napkin, and 
nearly put the uncle Scipion’s eye out. 
Uncle Scipion broke off in his discourse on 
the perfect joy of married life to call Henri 
a camel, and the bride’s bubbling peal of 
laughter caused her uncle to do what he, 
none other, called “cutting his discourse 
short.” 

The other toasts were brief and few. 

Then Lily was taken away by her grand- 
mother to change her frock, and to say good- 
bye to her Aunt Voilet, a paralysed sister of 
her father who had lived in the house ever 
since she could remember, and her constant 
intercourse with whom explained the girl’s 
fluent English. 

Drummond, a few minutes later, joined 
his wife — O word of wonder! — by Cousin 
Voilet’s sofa, where the invalid, a sharp- 
25 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

featured woman with blue-white false teeth 
that snapped when she talked, lay with 
plates of food and glasses of wine all about 
her. 

“Good-bye, Miss Crane,” Drummond said, 
gently, wondering how she could live with 
no air; “I will send you the postal cards.” 

“Thank you, Mr. Drummond. Kiss me 
good-bye, Lily.” 

Lily bent over the sofa. “Have you had 
enough to eat, Cousin Voilet?” 

“I’ve done very nicely, thank you, my 
dear.” 

They kissed and Lily cried a little, which 
lovely act confirmed Drummond for the hun- 
dredth time in his opinion that her character, 
like her complexion, was flawless. 

At the door of the cafe, — crowded with 
curious customers, — Madame Louvrier and 
her granddaughter embraced and parted, 
while Folichon, appropriately decorated with 
a white ribbon, begged from table to table 
and made a beast of himself on bits of sugar 
dipped into various glasses. This, old Mr. 
26 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

Billings considered a degrading spectacle. 

The carriage, drawn up in splendour in 
the shade before Madame Coutreau’s shop, 
bore the travellers down the street, and their 
hands, a little damp, were clasped tenderly. 

They took the three o’clock express for 
Paris, and, spending exactly twenty hours 
in that perilous capital, made their way 
southwards and took the boat for China 
where the miserable heathen were waiting 
for enlightenment. 


IV 


On the north coast of China, not very far 
from Shantung, is situated the Bledsoe Mis- 
sion. 

There is a chapel, beautiful with the beau- 
ties of corrugated iron, and half-a-dozen 
bungalows, each in its little compound. 
Close to the sea runs the long and filthy 
street that composes the European city, in 
which live most of the redeemed brethren. 

Higher up the gently sloping hill to the 
left, lies, a huddle of picturesque wooden and 
tiled roofs, the Chinese city, wherein no for- 
eign power has jurisdiction, and whither 
flee all Chinese refugees from the British and 
German settlements within a hundred miles. 
Old, old is the Chinese city. Its temple was 
filled with worshippers long before a certain 
Man was born at Nazareth; its present-day 
habits are those described by the earliest 
28 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

Jesuit missionaries and that cheery old 
rolling-stone, Marco Polo. Centuries leave 
here as few marks as do years in European 
cities ; the busy, inscrutable crowds gathered 
together to barter and sell in the market 
booths, are dressed precisely as were their 
ancestors when Harry the Eighth ruled in 
the little Island considered by some people 
so important. 

Serene, immutable, conservative to the nth 
power, the inhabitants of the Chinese city 
live their lives, worship their queer gods, 
squeeze their women’s feet, paint their crude 
pictures, eat their indescribable messes, and 
die their unemotional deaths, regarding the 
absurdities of their little band of white 
neighbours with a scorn too deep for words, 
probably even with a grim amusement. 

And it is these people to help in the con- 
version of whom Samuel Drummond 
brought his child-wife that day thirteen 
years ago. 

His bungalow, a small grey cottage with 
a deep, green-pillared verandah, was fur- 

29 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

nished according to the taste of its late in- 
habitants. 

There were cane-seated chairs, cheap 
shiny tables, two looking-glasses, both to be 
extolled as a remedy for budding vanity, 
coarse crockery, iron bedsteads, and sheets 
made of a slippery stuff, the name of which 
Lily never learned. 

“Very nice," declared Samuel the even- 
ing of their arrival, as he stood before the 
green-grey mirror in their bedroom, shav- 
ing. “And the sitting-room, especially, is 
really genteel." 

“Yes," assented Lily from the next room 
where she sat, her knees under her chin in 
the barrel-like stone bath tub; “the pictures 
are beautiful." 

She was immensely pleased at having a 
home of her own, and her ignorance of all 
matters of taste stood her in good stead. 

She admired the crude magenta wash on 
the walls, and the yellow antimacassars that 
adorned those of the chairs whose backs 
were not chiefly hole. There was one plush 
30 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

seated and backed rocking-chair whose 
splendours were protected by a piece of em- 
broidery representing Miss Muffet sitting 
on her tuffet, eating her curds and whey. 
This work of art the Drummonds thoroughly 
admired. 

It was now early in October, and the 
greatest heat of the summer was over, but 
they ate their strange little supper to the 
accompaniment of a buzzing electric fan, and 
found it none too cool. Their servant, Ah 
Fee, inherited, like the house, from their 
predecessors, and a noted convert of the 
strongest nonconformist convictions, slipped 
noiselessly in and out through the split bam- 
boo curtains, his beady unwinking eyes fixed 
on his master. 

“I hear very good things about you, Ah 
Fee,” Drummond observed kindly, at length. 

“Yessir, me welly good Chlistian. Me 
love Djlesus-Chlist welly much.” 

“That’s right. I shall expect you to give 
me your help in bringing other — other 
Chinese people into the fold.” 

3i 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

“Yessir, me help bling — Chinese peoples 
welly ignolant — poor lost sheep.” 

Lily watched her husband admiringly. 
He was so good, so wise, she thought. Un- 
consciously he had taught her to think this. 
He was so gentle with her, so kind, so im- 
measurably devot ! 

Madame Louvrier was right. He had 
caught the girl young and her mind had 
already begun to take the stamp of his. 

After supper the newcomers, sedately 
dressed in their best, went out to explore the 
field of their labours and to pay their re- 
spect to the Bradys, — the minister and his 
wife. 

The sea was very quiet, meeting the land, 
apparently, without a break or a seam, and 
lying nearly as motionless in the pale after- 
glow left by the sun behind the low moun- 
tains at the horizon. 

“It smells very bad, doesn’t it?” com- 
mented Lily, as they passed a chow-house 
under the verandah of which squatted half- 
a-dozen great broad-shouldered coolies, 
32 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

stripped to the waist, eating their mess of 
rice with a great noise of chopsticks. 

These gentry and others, gazed unmoved 
at the Europeans ; the sight was ridiculous to 
them, but they were used to it. Lily’s fair 
hair, caught by the light of a lantern, shone 
in a way offensive to their taste, but they 
made no remarks. Supper was important, 
and fantan to come, and the opium pipe. 
These things were perennial, eternal, but the 
coming and going of absurd foreigners made 
no real mark whatever on their great coun- 
try. 

Lily paused to look into the windows of 
the pawnbroker’s shop, and again at the fish- 
monger’s, where by the light of torches, 
housewives laid in their supplies. 

Down by the little pier where once a month 
one of the smaller boats from Shanghai 
stopped for water, solemn merchants walked 
gravely, listening to each other’s remarks 
with that politeness which puts our curt 
civility to shame. 

A woman in a bright magenta jacket and 

33 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

as bright blue trowsers, dragged along by 
one arm a deliciously fat baby in a loose 
garment that displayed most of his smooth 
body, toasted by the sun to a turn. 

“Look, Lily, what a fine boy !” said Drum- 
mond. But Lily was busy looking at the 
mother’s blue enamel earrings. 

“See her earrings — oh, yes, the baby. I 
don’t like babies,” she answered absently. 

Drummond stopped short. “Not like 
babies! Why, Lily!” 

She gazed up at him. “Ah, — I have 
shock you? I am sorry. But, no, I do not 
like them at all,” she insisted gently. 

Drummond drew her to him and leaned 
against a sampan that stood just above the 
high tide line. 

“But, darling,” he said, very gently, his 
stern face softening, “you mustn’t say that. 
Suppose the Lord — sent us one?” 

Her vivacious answer was in French, and 
he asked her to repeat it in English. After 
a pause she gave him what was obviously a 
Bowdlerized translation. “I said I hoped 
34 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

the Lord will not , Samuel. That was all.” 

He was silent, and after a minute they 
went their way back through the village and 
up the hill. He was very much in love and 
wished above all things that his moulding 
of her might be a painless process. Mould 
her, of course, he must. That was his first 
duty, but she was seventeen and he was 
thirty-two; and he was big and strong and 
she was little and delicate, — he must not 
frighten her. 

After a bit he asked her if she had as yet 
made any* plans for her garden, and they 
returned no more to the subject of the hypo- 
thetical baby. 

The minister and his lady they found at 
home and frankly awaiting their call. 

“I knew you’d come, dear Brother Drum- 
mond,” Mr. Brady said, by way of greeting. 

He was a small, thin man, middle-aged 
and kind-looking, with missionary stamped 
all over him. 

His wife, who, physically, would have 
made three of him, had a moist-looking, pink 
35 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

face and a kind, wavering smile. She had 
on a loose, grey gown trimmed with black, 
for which she apologised, explaining that 
with ’er size, by the time evening came it 
was absolutely necessary to get into some- 
thing comfortable. 

The minister, impeccably black, but for 
his linen, from head to foot, wore straw 
Chinese slippers and kept one foot on the 
rung of a neighbouring chair, as ’is corns 
were that troublesome of late. 

Kind, conscientious, self-sacrificing, vul- 
gar people, whose limited vision and lack of 
imagination allowed them to survey their 
efforts to Christianize China with comfort- 
ing optimism. 

Mrs. Brady, while the gentlemen discussed 
the conditions of the community, gave her 
young friend much good advice. Wing Fook 
was the man to go to when one’s clothes were 
worn out and needed copying; the man who 
brought fish on Wednesdays was pretty well 
to be trusted, but Lily was to beware of him 
of Fridays. 


36 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

“And you must get a topee at once, my 
dear. It’s very hot still in the middle of 
the day, and we can’t ’ave you laid up with 
sunstroke. Whitelow’s is the place. You 
can get everything at Whitelow’s, from hats 
to soap. They ’ave Monkey Brand now, I 
am glad to say,” continued the good lady, 
“and fairly good bacon. Eggs are the great- 
est difficulty.” 

To these domestic details Lily listened 
with the placidity of the born Housekeeping 
Failure. It interested her far more to over- 
hear the information Mr. Brady was now 
giving her husband about the other mission- 
aries. 

“The Blands you will like; Brother Bland 
is a most earnest worker in the vineyard, — 
and Sister Bland is as earnest. Then the 
Smiths, yes, yes, tlie Smiths are earnest too, 
but they are younger,” went on the Minister 
indulgently, “and I fear Sister Smith is not 
quite so serious-minded as she might be. 
They have four little ones, — the youngest 
just four days old.” 


37 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

“I have a letter to Mr. Penguin — ” 

Mrs. Brady fanned herself vigorously. 
“Oh, yes, the Penguins. Miss Penguin is 
an invalid, unfortunately, and will be obliged 
to go home. ' E is a good man, a very good 
man. Ah, yes, one of our most earnest 
workers.” 

Lily said that she would be very glad to 
meet the excellent Penguins. 

When the Drummonds left, Mr. and Mrs. 
Brady went with them to the gate of the 
compound. 

“Now, my dear,” Mrs. Brady said to Lily, 
kissing her kindly, “remember, we are all 
friends here, and whenever you want any 
’elp of any kind, or the loan of anything, 
I'm always ready!” 

Through the starlit darkness, the new 
labourers in the vineyard went home, arm- 
in-arm. 


B8 


Days at the Mission were much alike; 
each was like its predecessor; the months, 
looked back upon, melted together like the 
sleepers of a railway track seen from a mov- 
ing train. 

When the fourth anniversary of their 
arrival came round, Lily Drummond could 
hardly believe it was really the fourth. 

“Are you sure it isn't three years, dear?” 
she asked her husband; and Drummond 
assured her gravely that he was sure. 

“The first anniversary was our little din- 
ner party, don't you remember? And the 
second, Mrs. Brady was so ill, — you were 
with her all day.” 

“Oh, yes, — last year, of course, was the 
riot. I remember now. But it hardly seems 
possible.” 

The little missionary lady sat in her 

39 


1 

Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

verandah, sewing. She was making a frock 
for one of the Rescued Orphans, a dull grey 
garment warranted to last through the 
stormy infancy of several Orphans. 

The years had changed Lily Drummond. 
She had been, when she came to the Mission, 
so young, so unformed, that, as was natural, 
Drummond, himself a strong, patient nature, 
had impressed her mind as much uncon- 
sciously as consciously, with the stamp of his. 
Too wise in his narrow way to frighten her 
at first with the work that was very nearly 
his whole life, he let her gradually accustom 
herself to the strange mental tone of the little 
community, and then, little by little she had 
come to do her share in the great work. 
She read aloud, at first, to the long-suffering 
Celestials at the Mission School; then she 
was promoted to giving a few regular les- 
sons to the half-grown boys who learned so 
readily all that she told them; and a little 
later, when Drummond felt that her igno- 
rance in religious matters would no longer 
put him to shame, her occupation became 
40 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

that of “telling the story of Jesus to the poor 
heathen.” 

To this story the poor heathen listened with 
an exquisite courtesy that delighted the 
workers who had hitherto met only with the 
vulgar rudeness, or at least the vulgar good 
intent, of the London poor. The poor 
heathen said little, as is their way, and that 
little was soothing to the missionaries, some 
of whom wrote home to the periodicals of 
their sect, describing in flowery language 
the beautiful behaviour of the more enlight- 
ened of the denizens of the Flowery King- 
dom. 

It is, of course, as impossible to state what 
the converted Chinese of the Bledsoe Mis- 
sion really thought, as it is to declare what 
the idols in their great temples think, or 
what the Omnipotent Power overhead thinks 
of the missionaries’ labours and their results. 
The Omnipotent Power, however, being 
Justice Personified, some theologians to the 
contrary notwithstanding, must at least, in 
judging the men and women of the Bledsoe 
4i 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

Mission, count to their credit their indomi- 
table courage, their sincerity, and their kind- 
ness to each other as well as to those to suc- 
cour whom they had left the millions of 
suffering poor at home. 

The Smiths, the Penguins, the Blackers 
and the rest indeed laboured in season and 
out, and labouring out of season on the north 
coast of China is no joke. 

The blazing summer days, hotter than the 
stay-at-home European can conceive, are 
trying to the temper as well as to the health. 
Then there are the rains, when for weeks 
the earth is a great sponge, and sickness 
abounds. In the winter the cold is intense; 
and snow lies round about, crisp and cold 
and even, like the snow in Good King 
Wenceslaus. Then for months no steamer 
comes, the post is brought once a month 
by a runner (who, judging by the time he 
takes, does anything but run) from Shan- 
tung or Wei-Hai; the little community is as 
much cut off from the outer world as if it 
were located on a desert island. 

42 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

And through these vicissitudes the com- 
munity went its way, patient and kind, 
ignorant and vain, a very epitome of the 
world in miniature, but for a marked lack 
of enmity and greed that characterized it. 

When poor Miss Penguin died, in mid- 
winter, Samuel Drummond, the strongest 
and most muscular of the missionaries, him- 
self dug her grave, cleaving through three 
feet of snow and gouging up the frozen 
earth with a pickaxe until a hole had been 
made sufficiently large to secure the poor, 
painted coffin from the wolves. And he and 
Brother Blacker it was who carried the 
coffin to its grave on their shoulders. 

Mrs. Blacker’s baby, on the other hand, 
was born in July, two years after the arrival 
of the Drummonds, a humid, hot day when 
things stuck to one’s hands and the Aus- 
tralian butter floated precisely like oil, in its 
tins. 

Mrs. Blacker was desperately ill, and the 
Mission doctor, himself at death’s door with 
dysentery, could not go to her. 

43 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

Then, in the hour of need, it was Penguin, 
long, thin, lath-like in build, given to over- 
profuse perspiration and constant dyspepsia, 
who came to the rescue. Mrs. Blacker 
never forgot the wonderful things he was, 
by God's grace, enabled to do for her, and 
the rather gruesome details were considered 
appropriate subject matter for confidential 
talks over teacups, until the poor lady died, 
six years later, from the bite of one of the 
rare little adders found under the stones of 
the brook near the gates of the Chinese city. 

There are other stories that might be told 
of the brotherly and sisterly love of these 
voluntary exiles, stories that redound, all of 
them, to the eternal credit of their kind. 

And the Mission flourished. Year by 
year the number of converts increased and 
was duly quoted in the home-sent Reports. 
The number of backsliders was not recorded, 
and even among themselves, once one of 
these sinners was found to have slid beyond 
recall, he was not often mentioned. 

At the end of the Drummonds' second 

44 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

year, the Blands were obliged to send their 
two children home. The less said about the 
scene on the pier when the mother said good- 
bye to the two little creatures dressed in 
their best and frightened to death by the 
strange “friend” who was to look after 
them, the better. Lily Drummond never 
forgot it. 

The one wedding that took place at the 
Mission during her first four years there, 
was more cheerful, though why weddings 
should be cheerful only God knows. The 
joy should be celebrated after say, five years, 
when the celebrants and their friends really 
know that that particular example of the 
most rashly entered into of human contracts 
is going to be that rarest of rare things, a 
really happy marriage. Another story this, 
however. 

Young Pansy Penguin, a niece of the 
elderly brother and sister who were the 
doyens of the Mission, came out to visit her 
relations, from Penang, where her father had 
a shop. A ghostly slip of a thing, as yel- 
45 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

low as ivory, with blue rings round her eyes, 
and purple lips, a very wreck after three 
solid years in “the states,” as the Malay 
Federation is there called in glorious disre- 
gard of another and greater Federation in 
the American Continent, — she yet attracted 
a fat, rosy, peony-like youth on his way to 
enter a bank in Nagasaki. 

Velvety, juicy-looking, pink as a young 
pig, Mr. James Arthur Skindle saw and 
loved the diaphanous and malarious Pansy. 
The wedding took place in the Mission 
Chapel, decorated with yellow flowers for 
the occasion, North China at that season 
being flowery only in yellow shades. 

It was a very festive week— that of the 
wedding — and Lily made for herself a new 
frock of cotton crepe, pink in hue (in which, 
surrounded by the yellow flowers, she had 
never looked less pretty), and there was, in 
the adjoining compounds of the Penguins 
and the Blackers, a meal composed of the 
combined products of all the Mission ladies’ 
skill. 


46 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

Mrs. Brady with her own hands made the 
cake, a fact sufficient in itself to lend dis- 
tinction to any festivity, and none of the 
brethren and sisters had ever touched any- 
thing so delicious as Miss Penguin’s roast 
chickens or Mrs. Blacker’s trifle. 

The bridegroom being the only stranger, 
it was much like a large family party with, 
however, none of the distressing features 
usual at such gatherings. When the young 
couple had gone off in the boat, the converts 
had their share of the fun. 

There was a meal for them in the school- 
room, but as the chairs were delightfully 
inferior in number to the converts, nearly 
twenty of the latter partook of their food 
squatting in the national attitude on their 
haunches in the compound. 

What did they think of it, the yellow men 
and women, as they gravely partook of the 
horrible food offered to them with equal-to- 
equal smiles, by the white women? No man 
knows. 

But the party was a great success, and 

47 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

the hosts were satisfied, whether the guests 
were or not; and that, everyone knows, is 
the chief thing. 


VI 


The Drummonds had no children; and the 
disappointment was a sore one to Samuel. 
He would have loved to have a son to bring 
up as he fancied sons ought to be brought 
up; he longed for the responsibility of a 
human soul of his own creation under the 
Lord. 

But none came. Gradually Lily too be- 
gan to regret the fact, whether on his 
account alone, or also partly because in the 
warm family atmosphere of the Mission her 
woman nature had begun to develope, it 
would be difficult to say. Before the hus- 
band and wife slept, they used to pray, kneel- 
ing by their bedside, and one of the prayers 
was always for the little Drummond who so 
obstinately refused to appear. 

Samuel rejoiced in her change of heart; 
he rejoiced greatly in his pretty, incapable, 
49 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

silent little wife; sometimes he asked him- 
self if he did not rejoice too much. 

Lily was gentle, thoughtful of his com- 
fort; she adored his wisdom and his 
strength; his piety was to her a constant 
source of wonder, but she was, and re- 
mained, unlike the other sisters. 

Daily, weekly, monthly, year in and year 
out, she did her duty among the women and 
children of the converts, and to everyone’s 
surprise she was the quickest of all to pick 
up a useful vocabulary of disjointed Chinese 
words of the dialect prevailing in that part 
of the north. So that she, of all the mission- 
aries except Brother Penguin, could go 
farthest in a conversation with one of the 
heathen; but she never learned to hammer 
her belief into their yellow skulls, and she 
never learned the pious taking-of-the- 
Lord’s - name - in - familiarity so universal 
among missionaries. 

“I cannot tell them God thinks this or 
that,” she used to protest, “because I don’t 
SO 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

know . How can I be sure that God wants 
Ching’s little boy to take cod liver oil?” 

Mrs. Brady, more and more given, as she 
grew older, to the wearing of “something 
comfortable,” summed up Sister Drum- 
mond’s shortcomings in a few words, one 
night in bed. 

“I know, Joshua,” she said to the worthy 
Brady who was pretending to be asleep, “it’s 
this: the dear child is as good as gold, and 
as willing as ever she can be, but — she ’asn’t 
got the Vocation.” 


5 * 


VII 


Of all the other brethren and sisters Mrs. 
Brady had hitherto had grounds for doubt- 
ing the Vocation of only one. This was 
Sister Smith. 

Sister Smith, it may be remembered, had 
been mentioned to the Drummonds on the 
occasion of their first call on the minister 
and his wife, as being not quite so sure to 
meet with the newcomers’ approval as were 
happily the dear Sisters Bland, Penguin and 
the rest. 

But Lily had liked Sister Smith. This 
lady, a short, square-built woman with fierce 
black eyes and a dimpled chin, had herself 
begun mission life as a convert. She had 
never been Chinese, but she had, she said 
quite openly, been as great a heathen as any 
yellow woman among ’em. 

There had been a time, extending over an 
S2 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

indefinite period, when God had been to her 
as negligible a quantity as a personage she 
referred to casually as the Perrime Minis- 
ter. She had come out to Shanghai to work 
in one of them big shops on the Bund, but 
Lor’ bless you, she ’adn’t stayed there. No. 
When Smith found ’er she was singing in 
the Victoria Music ’All in a state of sin. 

Smith converted her, married her, and 
took her with him to Yokohama, whence, 
after two years’ work among the little Japs, 
they had been sent to the Bledsoe. 

Furiously, fanatically religious was Sister 
Smith now, her zeal among the heathen 
often leading to her manhandling them. A 
hot-tempered, impetuous creature, half full 
of Irish blood, her only serious fault was 
that she would use the horrors of her own 
past to illustrate the glories of her present 
state of grace. Sometimes her stories were 
not what the brethren and sisters consid- 
ered elevating. But between Lily Drum- 
mond and this successfully snatched brand, 
a kind of friendship sprang up. Sister 
53 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

Smith alone, of all the missionaries, pos- 
sessed a sense of humour, and this, although 
in spite of her merry laugh, her own had, 
under Drummond’s teaching, remained 
rather rudimentary, was to Lily a cooling 
spring. 

One evening, when the Drummonds had 
been married about six months, Drummond 
came home from the school where he had 
been expounding to a class of older boys, in 
words of two syllables, the story of Revela- 
tions, and found his wife absent. 

It had never happened before and he at 
once set out in search of her. 

She was not at Mrs. Brady’s; she was not 
with Sister Penguin. He was on his way to 
the Blacker’s, when on passing the Smith’s 
bungalow, he heard a sound he had not heard 
for a much longer time than he had realised 
— Lily’s laugh. It took him back in a flash 
to the narrow street in Boulogne, to the 
Cafe du Perroquet Bleu, to the slavish 
Folichon. Lily laughing like that, and in 
the Smiths’ bungalow ! 

54 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

Lily told him, when he had summoned 
her and they were walking homewards, what 
the story was that had caused her outburst. 
It was a perfectly harmless story about an 
upset sampan, and he could find no fault with 
it. He was a good man and a just one, but 
he was as prejudiced as many others of the 
unco’ guid. It may have been a kind of 
jealousy that prompted him to give the order, 
but, to give him his due, he did not know it. 
He honestly believed that it was because he 
did not approve of Sister Smith. The order 
was that Lily should no more go to the 
Smiths’, that her intercourse with the Irish- 
woman should cease. 

“But, Samuel, her feelings! She will be 
hurt!” 

He reflected; his long upper lip pressed 
firmly on its fellow. 

“You must hurt her as little as possible. 
Go nowhere for a few weeks, — that will ease 
it for her. And afterwards, — she will un- 
derstand.” 

Poor Sister Smith did understand. Her 

55 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

fiery black eyes glared just once at her 
treacherous friend, but Lily’s golden-brown 
ones in return filled with tears, and Sister 
Smith nodded kindly. 

“Never mind, my dear,” she managed to 
say to Lily once, in a shop, “it’s him, and I 
know it, and maybe he’s right. Only — I’m 
sorry.” 

“So am I,” said Lily simply, holding out 
her hand. 

And thus ended the Sister Smith episode. 
With it ended again little Sister Drum- 
mond’s merry fits of laughter. Once Drum- 
mond said to her, almost fretfully, “Why 
do you never laugh any more?” 

“I do laugh, Samuel,” she returned, sur- 
prised. 

“Not as you used to. The last time was 
at — Sister Smith’s that evening.” 

Her face cleared. “Oh, yes, I remember, 
— that way, you mean. What Grand’mere 
called my 'crises’ ! Well, I don’t know why, 
I’m sure. I suppose,” she added, sedately, 
“I’m growing older.” 

56 


VIII 


The blinds of the bungalow were down, the 
creepers on the green pillars of the damp 
verandah hung limp in the glaring heat. 

It was the 28th day of August and the 
day of Samuel Drummond's funeral. Up 
the low hill to the right the little procession 
had gone an hour before, and now Mr. and 
Mrs. Brady were bringing back the widow 
to her empty house. 

Mrs. Brady, now vastly fat, and still with 
her wavering smile, held Mrs. Drummond's 
hand. Mr. Brady had taken his topee off 
in the shade of his green-lined umbrella, and 
was mopping his nearly bald head and face 
with a not over-fresh handkerchief. It was 
to the good man a source of fretful annoy- 
ance that his fat wife had a trick of keeping 
cool and dry in the hottest weather, while 
57 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

he’, a mere skeleton of a man, oozed at every 
pore. 

" 'The Lord gave/ ” he observed presently, 
his eye glued on the blue, metallically glint- 
ing sea before him, — Mrs. Drummond nod- 
ded resignedly — “ 'and the Lord hath taken 
away.’ ” 

"I know, Mr. Brady, but how can I live 
without him?” 

"Don’t be wicked, Lily.” Mrs. Brady 
spoke cheerfully, as one speaks to a child 
whose words must be answered but whose 
mind has put no question. 

"I know, I know, but — oh, Mrs. Brady 

The young woman’s sobs shook her shoul- 
ders under their ill-fitting covering of cheap 
black material. Her face was very pale, and 
her hair was untidy under her topee with its 
long black veil. The Bradys glanced at 
each other. 

It was painful, but it was proper; it was 
right that a young woman should thus mourn 
her husband. They were deeply sorry for 

58 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

Lily Drummond, but they too entirely ap- 
proved of her despair to take any vigorous 
means of checking it. So they talked, as 
they went up the short path to the bungalow, 
of Heaven and its joys, and the bliss of 
Samuel Drummond since the day before 
yesterday, and she cried on. 

Ah Fee, apparently quite unchanged by 
the years, lifted up the bamboo curtains at 
the door, for them to enter. 

“Missee Dlummond no cly, ,, he said 
gently. “Master wellee happy allee topside 
with Djlesus Chlist.” 

Lily tried to smile, for Samuel had been 
fond of the man. 

Tea stood on a table in the shabby room, 
and in front of the photograph of him 
who had just been buried, Ah Fee had put 
a vase of magenta and yellow asters. It 
was an inartistic effort, but valuable as a 
token of love, and again the widow smiled 
at the Chinaman. 

“Thank you, Ah Fee,” she said. 

Her voice was deeper than it used to be, 

59 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

and remarkably melodious, with a curious 
little tremor in its lower tones, and even 
now, — after many hours of crying, it fell 
pleasantly on the ear. 

“Now sit down, dearie, and drink your 
tea, like a good girl,” Mrs. Brady began, 
taking off her topee and displaying that most 
unusual thing, in a woman, an almost bald 
head. “It’ll fix you up all right. Ah Fee, 
tell the Amah to bring Missee’s slippers 
chop chop.” 

Mrs. Drummond, with the air of one who 
is tired out with grief, sank down on the 
ancient rocking-chair. On the back of it 
hung a red and blue antimacassar of her 
own crocheting. The one with little Miss 
Muffet had long since succumbed to time. 

Mrs. Brady pulled the black-headed pins 
from Mrs. Drummond’s topee, took the ugly 
thing off and smoothed with her fat hand 
the untidy hair, fairer than it used to be, 
owing to the bleaching action of the hot sun. 

“Now, you’re not going to cry any more 
to-day; it’s bad for you, and he’d hate it. 
6q 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

And God is good ; you can be pretty sure He 
knew what He was about when He called 
Samuel.” 

Mrs. Drummond blew her nose and nod- 
ded. “Of course He did, Mrs. Brady,” she 
returned with a dutiful air that sat oddly 
on her clean-cut face. “I am not question- 
ing His will, only, — I don’t see how I can 
live without him.” 

The Creator’s name was, in this corner 
of Cathay, such a familiar household word, 
His way always such a commonplace matter 
of discussion, that Lily Drummond in her 
vagueness ran no risk of having Mrs. Brady 
think that she meant she could not live with- 
out Him. 

The old woman poured out the tea, while 
her husband stood looking down at the pho- 
tograph of the dead man. It was a fine face 
— Samuel Drummond’s — broad of brow and 
deep of eye. He had improved in looks un- 
der his rigid duty-doing, his mouth had 
strengthened, his eyes were more finely set 
than in his youth. He had been a devout, 
61 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

good man, and nearly a handsome one. 
There was authority in his look, and the old 
minister smirked suddenly, as he gazed at 
the picture of his late lieutenant. 

“He was pretty pig-headed, was Sam,” 
he thought, “pretty pig-headed.” 

The room had changed little in the past 
years ; the matting, although quite new, was 
of the same kind as the one Lily had found 
there; and the cheap, plush-covered furni- 
ture, bought as a surprise for Lily on her 
fifth wedding anniversary, was now old. 
Between the two windows was a row of 
books, all, judging by their titles, of doc- 
trinal tendencies. In one window stood a 
basket full of knitting and needlework of 
different sorts. On the whitewashed walls 
hung a few pictures, two large crayon draw- 
ings, evidently “enlargements,” and as evi- 
dently Samuel Drummond’s father and 
mother, grim-looking people in their best 
clothes ; the other pictures being a coloured 
reproduction of “Bubbles” and one of Land- 
seer’s enormities. 


62 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

Mr. and Mrs. Brady appeared quite at 
home in this dreadful room, but the little 
widow looked subtly alien to it. Her small 
face, swollen by tears though it was, was 
very delicate in outline, and her large dark 
eyes seemed to have been meant to gaze on 
better things. But to her it was home, and 
she loved it, and she was leaving it. 

“O Mr. Brady,” she exclaimed suddenly, 
setting down her blue tea-cup with a little 
crash, “how can I bear to go there! What 
if I shouldn’t like them?” * 

“My dear child, not like his father and 
mother? Why, Lily, what can you be 
thinking of?” Mrs. Brady was sincerely 
scandalised, for her creed of brotherly love 
extended even unto “in-laws.” 

Mr. Brady poured his tea into his saucer 
and sucked it up with a loud noise, as if he 
had been a duck gobbling weeds. 

“She didn’t mean it, Bessie,” he protested 
kindly; “she’s tired out, that’s what’s the 
matter with her.” 

“I suppose it is, Mrs. Brady,” agreed Lily 

63 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

Drummond eagerly; “it was all so sudden. 
And they will surely be very kind to me. 
I wish,” she added drearily, “that my hair 
wasn’t curly.” 

“Why, Lily!” 

“Well, I do. He used to say his mother 
and father didn’t approve of it, and when I 
had my picture taken, I put vaseline on it to 
smooth it down.” 

The Bradys did not smile. It seemed to 
them quite natural that the minister in Clap- 
ham should look on curly hair as a snare 
of the devil. The young woman herself, 
too, was perfectly 'serious. 

“That was eight years ago,” she began 
presently, as the noiseless Ah Fee removed 
the tea things. “To think that we have 
been — I mean were — married eleven years !” 

“Yes, my dear,” returned the old man 
kindly, “for eleven years you have worked 
in God’s vineyard. It must console you a 
good deal to think what a good wife you 
were to our dear Samuel.” 

64 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

"I did my best/’ she faltered, “but I am 
very weak.” 

“You obeyed ’im, and as he was the 
stronger vessel, it was right and good in 
God’s eyes. Samuel Drummond died 
young, but he laid up for himself a great 
store of good works. Of all our people ’e 
was the most gifted. God gave him not only 
great zeal but great skill.” 

The good man’s voice warmed as he went 
on, the two women listening to him with 
unquestioning attention. 

“When ’e came here, just eleven years 
ago, there were only thirty-eight Christian 
Chinamen in the ’ole district, and now look 
at our schools and our chapels! Verily the 
Lord hath blessed our work.” 

“But it was not all Samuel,” suggested the 
widow, with perfunctory politeness. “You 
yourself, dear Mr. Brady, and all the 
others, — ” 

There was nothing consciously tiresome 
to her in all this talk. She had heard no 

65 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

other since her husband had brought her to 
the place; his work had been hers, his inter- 
ests the only ones she knew. 

They sat on and on in the little room, and 
presently, like a blue ghost in the gloom, Ah 
Fee stole in, and pulling up the blinds, let in 
the late afternoon sun. Through the holly- 
hocks that bloomed close to the windows, 
descendants of flowers sent to Drummond 
as seeds* all the way from Clapham, a 
glimpse of the sea was visible, and behind 
the mountains on the right, the sun was 
going down, quite quietly, as if he had not 
been blazing like a hundred suns all day. In 
the green hollows of the lower slopes of the 
mountains, pools of purple mist were gather- 
ing, and somewhere behind the bungalow a 
harsh, jerky bell began to ring. It was the 
call to chapel, and the Bradys had forgotten 
that time rolled speedily. 

“Goodness me, Joshua, you'll be late ! You 
must hurry," Mrs. Brady exclaimed, tying 
the narrow black ribbons of her topee under 
her fat chin. “I'll run in to-night, Lily 
66 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

dear," she added cheerfully, “and we’ll all 
pray for you, you know.” 

“Thank you, Mrs. Brady, I — ” 

But her voice failed her and she turned 
away. A minute later and she was alone. 
Alone for the first time in her life, one may 
say. For from the day when Samuel Drum- 
mond married her, she had never spent five 
consecutive hours away from him. And 
now he was gone for ever. She sat alone in 
the dying light, trying, as women have tried 
before, to realise the meaning of the word 
“for ever.” 

“Missee Dlummond no cly,” murmured 
the Chinaman, his queer, tight-buttoned eyes 
fixed unblinkingly on her. “Master welly 
happy longside Ledeemer.” 


67 


IX 


It had been so sudden; Samuel had been ill 
in the spring, and they had talked of going by 
boat to the big German Naval Station where 
the good doctors were. Then he had got 
better and they had given up the expensive 
journey. 

A new school was building, and Drum- 
mond had taken great delight in watching its 
progress. He himself had contributed to 
its erection more than he could really afford, 
but giving was blessed in the sight of the 
Lord. 

Mr. Penguin had gone for a holiday and 
the Blands were in England with their chil- 
dren, now a big boy and girl — it was diffi- 
cult to realise — of sixteen and fourteen. In 
consequence of their diminished numbers and 
the comforting increase of converts, the re- 
maining missionaries had been very busy 
68 


* 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

all the summer. Samuel Drummond had 
overworked, no doubt. He had grown thin 
and pale, and had slept badly, but he had not 
only never complained, he accepted no sym- 
pathy and even his wife was not allowed to 
talk about his health. 

His dying as he did, after a quite com- 
monplace attack of dysentery, seemed now 
to the widow as an act of not quite perfect 
fairness. He should have let her know how 
bad he was. 

And then in despair at her blackness of 
heart, she prayed aloud, in the simple way 
long since become a part of her life, for for- 
giveness. 

“O God,” she said, clasping her hands, 
“forgive thy servant. I am very bad and 
ungrateful to think that — ” she expressed 
her contrition in English. She had neither 
spoken nor heard French for years, for those 
among whom she had lived looked upon a 
knowledge of the French tongue as a rather 
disgraceful thing, not altogether unlinked 
with the devil. 


69 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

As she prayed, her eyes fell again on the 
photograph of Samuel, and she burst into 
unrestrained sobs. 

She was so lonely; so awfully, frighten- 
ingly lonely. How could she possibly live 
without Samuel? He had thought for her, 
told her what to eat, what time to get up, 
what time to go to bed. His calm strength 
had never failed either himself or her. 
And here she was, she, Lily Drummond, 
a heart-broken widow, going all the 
way across Siberia to Europe, alone, to 
Clapham. 

She glanced nervously at the portraits of 
Samuel's father and mother on the walls. 
Suppose they did not like her? 

The fear had always haunted her, even in 
his lifetime, and now it grew to nightmare 
proportions. 

Mrs. Blacker, whose hourly expectation 
of a tardy baby had dispensed from the even- 
ing prayer-meeting, found the widow on her 
knees by the photograph, and raised her 
gently to her feet. 


7 ° 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

“You mustn’t take on so, Sister Drum- 
mond,” she said; “you really mustn’t.” 

“O Sister Blacker, I am so lonely, and I 
wasn’t meant to be alone!” 

“This trial just proves that God thinks 
you are,” reproved the elder woman a little 
severely. “Do not rebel. Think how it 
would displease him” 

“It was so sudden, — just think, Sister 
Blacker, only the day before yesterday at 
this time he was with me. I had just given 
him his gruel. His last cup !” 

Again she cried helplessly. 

The two women sat together for a long 
time and then Sister Blacker called Ah Fee, 
and went home, knowing that the dear 
Bradys were coming back after chapel. 

The dear Bradys came, and partook 
heartily of the supper at which Lily could 
not even look. 

They were fatherly and motherly and kind 
in every way, and they quieted the poor little 
thing, and finally left her in her bed, sound 
asleep. 


The last day came; a cloudy day in Sep- 
tember; and all Mrs. Drummond’s “things” 
were packed and ready for the coolies to 
carry to the boat. 

She was to go about a hundred and fifty 
miles up the coast to a place where she could 
get the Peking train, and then on to make 
connection with the Trans-Siberian Express 
at Harbin. 

Her horror of the journey was greatly 
mitigated by a piece of news brought a few 
days before by good Mrs. Brady, bursting 
in breathless at breakfast time, still attired 
in the “something comfortable” that she now 
wore habitually in the early mornings as 
well as the late afternoons. 

“My dear! O Sister Drummond, God is 
good. His goodness indeed passes our 
’umble understandings.” She panted, 
72 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

snatching up an ancient palm-leaf fan and 
using it violently as she sank into the rock- 
ing-chair. 

Lily, who was seated at the table, writing 
labels for her boxes, looked up in surprise. 

<f What has happened?” 

Mrs. Brady drew a letter from her pocket. 
“You’ve ’eard me speak of my cousin, Sarah 
Pinker? ’Er that’s been so blessed in her 
work in Shan-hai-kwan ?” 

“Yes.” 

“Well, she’s got leave of absence for a 
year, and is going ’ome in the same train 
with you ! I knew she had applied for leave 
and I wrote to her over a fortnight ago, but 
I didn’t mention it to you for fear you’d be 
disappointed in case she couldn’t get off so 
soon. But now it’s sure . She’s delighted, 
and will meet you at Ching-tze-Kao.” 

Mrs. Drummond clasped her hands in 
mechanical reverence. “Thank God,” she 
said, meaning it deeply. 

“Yes, He is indeed good. You’ll like 
Sarah. She’s a little masterful — those big- 
73 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

nosed women always are — but she's a 'eart 
of gold, a real 'eart of gold, I always say. 
And she's an old traveller, too, and will take 
care of you. Not," the good woman added 
hastily, “that there’s any need of that, with 
God's goodness to protect you." 

The boat sailed at noon. 

All the morning the little bungalow was 
filled with friends, come to say good-bye; 
some of the sisters wept, most of them 
brought little presents. Sister Smith, who 
for years had not set foot in the Drummond's 
house, had brought a white crepe shawl on 
which were embroidered flying cranes. 

“Elwood gave it to me," she explained, her 
black eyes wet, “so you can take it all right." 

Elwood was Brother Smith. 

Mrs. Blacker, for the best of reasons — 
there were two of them, both boys — was un- 
able to be present, but she had sent her eldest 
girl with a jar of real marmalade, and many 
messages. 

The little drawing-room, denuded of the 
simple and for the most part hideous orna- 
7A 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

ments accumulated by the Drummonds since 
their arrival at the mission, looked bare, only 
the skeleton — so to speak — of the defunct 
home remaining. 

Ah Fee, as has been said, still button-eyed 
and wrinkleless, not a day older than he had 
been on that August evening eleven years 
ago, even his pigtail, owing to a discreet use 
of false hair, as fat and glossy as of yore, 
hovered round the door. 

He was welly solly Missee Dlummond go- 
ing; welly solly Master makee die; but he 
was a philosopher, and the new Master and 
Missee would be coming by the next big 
steamer to Shanghai, and they too would 
admire and cherish him. 

At last the time had come ; the coolies had 
trotted down the slope, the boxes swinging 
on their bamboo carrying poles; the last 
kisses had been exchanged; Mrs. Drum- 
mond’s Clapham address written down half- 
a-dozen times; her promise given to call on 
Mr. Smith’s sister in Shepherd’s Bush, and 
not to forget to send the box as soon as ever 
75 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

she could to Brother Blacker’s mother in 
Hammersmith. 

Remember, it was her home she was leav- 
ing, and that she had lived there for eleven 
years. 

In her own eyes, Lily Drummond was a 
middle-aged woman with a broken life. 

She shook hands with Ah Fee, she looked 
once more round the room, and then, throw- 
ing her arms round Mrs. Brady’s neck, gave 
a loud sob and literally ran out of the house 
into the sunlight. 



76 


XI 


The train came slowly into the station of 
Ching-tze-Kao, and stopped with a snort. 
That is to say, the locomotive drew up oppo- 
site the tumble-down building that appar- 
ently composed the whole of the town, 
leaving most of the carriages far down the 
platform in the pelting rain. 

The platform, too, did not deserve the 
name, for it was, as far as could be seen in 
the grey dawn, a vast mud-puddle between 
two stone copings, down which copings the 
passengers hurried under red or yellow oiled 
paper umbrellas. There was in all the crowd 
but one European umbrella, for the train was 
a local one. The European one, very large, 
not of silk, was carried by a woman, a 
woman whose skirts were lifted just too lit- 
tle to be free from the mud, just too much to 
be altogether proper. She had small thin 
77 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

feet in buttoned boots and gleaming over- 
shoes. The hand that held up the skirt also 
carried a large, shabby valise, with S. D. 
painted distinctly on its outside cover. 

Mrs. Samuel Drummond was on her way 
to England via Siberia. 

It was the fifth day since she had left her 
home, and three of the five nights she had 
passed sitting bolt upright in a crowded sec- 
ond-class compartment; connections had 
been missed, a bridge had been carried away 
by a flood, and a squabble between some 
Chinese and Japanese labourers on the line, 
to quiet which troops had been sent out, had 
lost another day. 

Lily Drummond was very tired and very 
wretched, and if it had not been too wicked 
she would have wished that she was dead. 
She was also very hungry, for since the pre- 
ceding noon she had had no food ; but as she 
plodded along in the rain amongst the 
crowds of Chinese and Japanese, she drew a 
deep sigh of relief, for here, at Ching-tze- 
Kao, Mrs. Pinker was to join her. 

78 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

Sarah Pinker would take care of her; 
Sarah Pinker would see that she had food;, 
Sarah Pinker would take charge of her trou- 
blesome and for-ever-getting-lost ticket. 

For Mrs. Drummond was a very bad trav- 
eller, and her utter dependence on her hus- 
band had made of her a creature nearly as 
helpless as a child. She was not timid, but 
her powers of fending for herself had never 
grown. 

“Only two hours more/' she said to her- 
self, folding her umbrella, as she came un- 
der the leaky roof of the station. 

Then, in passable Chinese, she asked a re- 
spectable-looking old Chinaman in a blue 
silk garment and a sailor hat tied under his 
chin with narrow black ribbons, where the 
restaurant was. 

The restaurant, she learned, had been 
burnt down the preceding week, but in the 
meantime food was to be had there, at that 
door on her right. 

The room she entered was not a cheerful 


one. 


79 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

The low roof was still lighted with foul- 
smelling lamps, for it was a dull day; the 
floor of earth beaten hard, but full of hol- 
lows, was wet, for the roof was leaking with 
a cheerless, splashing noise. 

On one side was a dirty, gaudy-looking 
refreshment bar, on the other the luggage- 
registering place, where three coolies were 
sleeping. It was all very sordid and hor- 
rid. 

Sarah Pinker, however, would soon be 
there. 

They brought her very good tea in a 
glass, and two very bad eggs which they re- 
moved, when she timidly protested, with an 
unwilling air that almost frightened her. 

Presently, her hunger overcoming her 
fears, she bought a packet of chocolate and 
sat down again, waiting for Mrs. Pinker, 
whose coming should change all things. 

People came in and out, clamouring for 
food and drink, chiefly drink; it was awful 
to see the men pour the fiery vodka down 
their throats. Mrs. Drummond did not 
80 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

know from experience that vodka was fiery, 
but it was one of the ready-made terms that 
are part of the lives of such as her husband 
had been — “Enervating wine,” “degrading 
opium,” “maddening whisky.” 

Another train came in, the sleeping cool- 
ies waked up, and with an indescribable din 
the travellers got their luggage rebooked. 
Then the train left, and Mrs. Drummond 
was alone in the restaurant, save for two 
German tourists who smoked bad cigars and 
talked about Family Affection in loud, angry 
voices. 

At last she fell asleep in her corner, and 
when she woke up, it was to find the res- 
taurateur, a handsome, villainous-looking 
Russian, holding a telegram to her and evi- 
dently asking if it was for her. It was. 
“Mrs. Drummond, Station Restaurant, 
Ching-tze-Kao,” and before she opened it 
she knew what it contained. 

“Minister typhoid journey postponed in- 
definitely writing Grand Hotel Harbin 
Sarah Pinker.” 


81 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

The young woman’s eyes filled with tears. 
Siberia appeared to her like a world trav- 
ersed by a single line of railway. The rest 
of her life would surely be passed in travel- 
ling that waste ; she must go on and on, for- 
ever, and alone. What a fool she had been 
to start, to trust to that unknown Sarah 
Pinker, who failed people. 

Then, ashamed of the thought, she tried 
to pray for guidance and courage. She 
was accustomed to pray in a practical way 
and was not ashamed to ask God to let her 
find some other woman going to England, 
that she might be looked after. 

At last, feeling somewhat cheered, she 
had more tea, and, taking pen and paper 
from her bag, wrote a long letter to Mrs. 
Brady, in which she spoke more kindly of 
Mrs. Pinker than she could, even after 
prayer, quite feel. 

This lack of accord between her mind and 
her emotions had always troubled her; her 
husband had talked to her about it, and she 
knew when she said, “Poor Mrs. Pinker! 
82 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

I am so sorry for her !” she ought not, as a 
good Christian, to feel at the same moment 
how inconsiderate it was of Mrs. Pinker’s 
minister to fall ill just at this time. But 
she did resent the minster’s lack of consid- 
eration in a very wicked way, and she was 
ashamed. 

The day was long, for the train did not 
leave until six o’clock, and it did not stop 
raining until after four. When it did 
cease, the curiously over-hanging sky broke 
into rosy crevasses of light. 

Mrs. Drummond, lifting up her skirts to 
the top of her boots, and pinning them with 
a safety pin, went for a walk. 

A pathetic little figure she looked in the 
vast plain of purple-gleaming mud, as she 
walked on into the sunset. 

There was nothing to see ; the only houses 
were of mud, the only trees a few shabby 
willows; but the air felt fresh and cool. 
Her crepe veil had got wet several times 
since she left home, and hung limply round 
her white face. Her hair curled in tendrils, 

S3 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

more pronounced than usual in the damp- 
ness, and she looked vaguely like a nun of 
some kind, with her white collar and ab- 
sorbed air. 

When she had walked for half-an-hour 
the rain suddenly came down as if the sky 
had opened, and there was nothing for it 
but to splash back to the station as fast as 
she could. 

Covered with mud, she sat down discon- 
solately, and the restaurateur came and 
rubbed her down with a friendly, but very 
dirty, towel. 

At six the train bore her away, appalled 
by her bwn helplessness and loneliness, and 
ashamed of her lack of faith. 


XII 


There was no sleep for Lily Drummond 
that night, for two reasons. In the first 
place, a Manchu woman's baby cried most 
of the night from earache: in the second 
place, a vision of the house for which she 
was bound haunted her ceaselessly. 

She hated herself for her fears, but they 
were very deep-seated. 

Years ago, her husband had talked of 
taking her to see his people on one of his 
rare holidays, but she dreaded the journey, 
she said, and they went to Korea instead. 
In reality it had been more the old people 
than the journey she dreaded; she knew all 
about them from her husband, the fine, un- 
bending quality of the old man, the stern 
righteousness of the old woman. 

She knew that they lived in a small house 
in Clapham, near the Common; that Mr. 

85 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

Drummond's chapel was filled with the most 
zealous of brethren; that his sermons were 
marvels of scriptural power. His chief tal- 
ent lay, she was aware, in the valuable line 
of presenting to his hearers the most blood- 
curdling pictures of hell ; and Samuel Drum- 
mond, his face lit with admiration, had once 
said to her that it was a difficult thing to de- 
scribe the same thing hundreds of times and 
never grow monotonous. She was con- 
vinced that there could be nothing more 
splendid for an able-bodied old man, than 
to devote the greater part of his time to de- 
scribing the terrors of the next world. 

She appreciated the abstemiousness of the 
minister and his wife, their pinching and 
saving for the poor heathen of foreign lands, 
their sacrificial joy in giving their only son 
to the great Cause. 

She knew that his mother's only jewel 
was a cameo brooch of a tombstone, over 
which hung a weeping willow; that his 
father prayed aloud every morning for 
twenty minutes. All these things the young 
86 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

wife knew, and yet, she told herself over 
and over again, really distressed by her own 
wickedness, she did not wish to go and live 
with these remarkable and admirable peo- 
ple. She had never wished to go, even 
when Samuel's wing was spread over her in 
shelter; and now, as the train bore her on 
towards them, a positive terror of them 
overcame her. 

“I am so silly," she repeated to herself 
over and over again, “so silly." 

Meantime, the Manchu woman, with the 
magenta rouge on her face, as is the fashion 
with virtuous wives in that country, watched 
the strange, white woman with the ridicu- 
lous curly hair and the white face, and 
thanked some favourite god of her own that 
she was not as the other. 

And this is Life, too. 

Slowly the night wore away, lighted only 
by the feeble flicker of an occasionally re- 
newed candle in a glass cage in one corner 
of the carriage. 

Mrs. Drummond dropped to sleep from 

87 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

time to time, only to wake with a start, stiff 
and chilly. 

The child wailed; two Japanese officers in 
ugly khaki uniform made tea and drank it 
out of little handleless cups, in perfect si- 
lence. 

The candle went out and, after an inter- 
val of utter darkness, during which Lily 
Drummond shivered with nervous terror, 
was replaced by another whose light seemed, 
by force of contrast, almost unbearably 
bright. 

Tears stood in Mrs. Drummond's eyes. 
That she, of all women, should be starting 
to cross Siberia all alone, seemed a cruel 
jest of Fate. She was frightened, she 
wanted her husband. Oh, how she wanted 
his arm to tuck her hand in, to lean upon. 

In all the beautiful quiet years, she had 
never once been lonely. Oh, how ungrate- 
ful she had been to feel sometimes that the 
quiet had been too great ! What would she 
not give to have it back ! 

But now, here she was, a heart-broken 

88 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

widow, going all the way across Siberia, 
alone. And her bonnet and veil were irre- 
trievably ruined, and she must get new ones 
in Harbin, thus spending at least twelve 
dollars Chinese. How disappointed Mrs. 
Brady would be if she knew. Mrs. Blacker, 
and even Mrs. Smith would have known 
how not to spoil their new things. Only 
she, Lily, did not know. 

“I am so silly,” she thought again. 

She ate chocolate at intervals, and 
prayed. 

At two o’clock she had to change trains, 
and was put into a compartment where two 
European women were comfortably lying 
down, smoking cigarettes. Apologising for 
disturbing them, she settled herself and de- 
cided to try and sleep. 

But the two women were talkative; they 
spoke French, which was evidently not the 
mother tongue of the younger one. 

Mrs. Drummond listened idly. It was 
strange and rather pleasant, hearing the 
pretty, soft syllables again, after so long; 

89 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

and the elder woman’s voice was delight- 
ful. 

“Of course my clothes are in rags,” she 
was saying. “Figure to yourself, my dear, 
fourteen months in the East ! Old as I am, 
I long to see my dressmaker.” 

“Silk splits so horribly in the dampness,” 
returned the other, “and as to gloves , my 
maid is in despair. When I think of stop- 
ping to see the Karmanoffs, I really almost 
despair myself.” The elder woman 
laughed. “And Vera Karmanoff, with all 
her clothes from Callot.” 

There was a short silence, and the 
younger one went on, with sudden decision. 

“I shall wire to Paris, have some things 
rushed through, and sent to Moscow. I 
really haven’t the courage to face the Kar- 
manoffs in shabby or badly-made clothes. I 
really haven’t!” 

“Quite right, ma chere,” returned her 
friend, lighting a fresh cigarette, the little 
flame showing up her strong, clever face. 
“I, who am old, lose all my courage if my 
90 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

gown doesn’t fit. Good clothes are a wom- 
an’s armour, I always think.” Pausing, 
she glanced at Lily, whose eyes were shut, 
and then added in an undertone : “Think of 
starting for Europe in that frock! Poor 
little thing, really quite pretty too.” 

In the faint light Mrs. Drummond’s face 
flushed slowly. No one had called her 
pretty since she had left her grandmother’s 
house — not even Samuel — and somehow she 
liked it. As to her poor frock and bonnet, 
vaguely she wondered if the Frenchwoman 
were right, if she would feel braver if her 
clothes were more stylish. That is the word 
she used in her mind — “stylish.” But, oh, 
how frivolous she was to think of such a 
thing. If Samuel knew, up there with God, 
how shocked he would be. Mechanically 
she said a few words of prayer, and, the two 
women ceasing their talk, she shortly after- 
wards fell asleep. 

And this is what she dreamed — the little 
missionary from China. 

She saw herself in a motor, as she had oc- 

9J 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

casionally seen motors in pictures, for a real 
one she had never beheld. And she wore a 
most beautiful white ball-gown, sparkling 
with specks of silver; and on her head was 
a diamond crown. The carriage rugs were 
all of sable, which to her ignorant imagina- 
tion was a quite black fur, and over her 
white gown she wore a loose wrap of crim- 
son satin, embroidered Chinese-fashion, 
with gold dragons and preposterous blue 
flowers. 

Thus attired, she was travelling across 
Siberia, and she was joyously, triumphantly 
unafraid. It was this sentiment of para- 
mount courage that was the chief feature of 
the dream; she had, since leaving the quiet 
corner of the earth that had been her home, 
been so troubled and wearied by her own 
incapacity, half-starved, half-thirsting to 
death, through the fault of her own helpless 
lack of foresight, that the feeling of royal 
ease was quite marvellous. The country 
was bare and cold as they went along, but 
92 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

she — Lily Drummond — was happy and un- 
afraid. 

It was a curious dream, but when she 
awoke with a start at Harbin, her cheeks 
were still flushed with triumph. 

It was very disillusioning to get out into 
the pouring rain, to struggle for her lug- 
gage, to hail a droschky and sit down in its 
mud and filth. Oh, if the dream were only 
true! 

Rattling across the villainously paved 
square to the hotel, a feeling of sick disgust 
came over her. What a coward she was, 
and how distressed Samuel would be if he 
knew. 


93 


XIII 


The luxurious liver is not advised by the 
present writer to go to Harbin. 

The town is filthy, ugly and depressing, 
and much the same may be said of the hotels. 
Mrs. Drummond's hotel presented to her 
that rainy morning a sad aspect. The end- 
less flights of iron stairs were covered with 
an extremely dirty and ragged drugget, the 
air was foul, and the servants, good-natured 
and willing, understood not a word of any- 
thing but Russian, and were maddeningly 
dull at understanding signs. She was shown 
into a small room furnished with the com- 
monest of bedroom necessities; the bare 
floor was dirty, the tiny electric bulb hung 
about one inch from a very high ceiling, and 
there were neither bed-clothes nor towels to 
be seen. The walls were painted, in stripes 
of various widths, with bright colours which 
94 


Mrs. Drummond’s [Vocation 

might possibly have pleased the more youth- 
ful inmates of a home for weak-minded chil- 
dren. 

It was a dreadful place, and even Lily 
Drummond, used as she was to the tasteless 
simplicity of the missionaries, was depressed 
by it. Her train left that evening at nine, 
so a long day was before her, and sitting 
down she tried to plan how to spend it to the 
best advantage. 

She took off her ruined bonnet and un- 
pinned her hair, which was a relief. Should 
she go out at once and buy the so sadly nec- 
essary new things and rest afterwards, or 
would it be better to rest first? She was 
desperately tired, and, catching sight of her 
weary face in the glass, decided suddenly to 
have a bath and go to sleep before she did 
anything else. 

Ringing, she signified that she wished a 
bath. The maid, a strapping wench in 
grey canvas shoes with preposterously high 
heels, brought her, with every appearance of 
good-will, a carafe of drinking water. A 
95 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

second attempt produced pen and ink, and 
after being offered an extra table and a blue 
sateen pillow, she gave up and went down- 
stairs in search of help, putting on her bon- 
net to hide the disorder of her hair. 

Finding a pallid youth playing a piano 
in a passage, she addressed him, and to her 
glad surprise, he answered her in American. 

“Yes, she might have a bath, some tea and 
some boiled eggs. Bath extra, towels ex- 
tra, and the food must be paid for at once.” 

It embarrassed Mrs. Drummond to talk 
about baths with a young man, but he did 
not seem to mind, and calling down the gig- 
gling maid, whose heels threatened to pre- 
cipitate her prematurely into another world, 
he gave her countless orders in Russian. 

As Lily listened to these orders, a tall 
man in uniform clanked down the passage, 
and the pallid youth and the maid leaped, 
obsequiously, out of his way. With the un- 
interested glance of a man for a plain, 
badly-dressed woman, he passed, and Mrs. 
Drummond almost gasped, as he went down 
96 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

the stairs. He was, she thought, the most 
beautiful creature she had ever seen. 

As a matter of fact, Serge Troumetskoi 
was a big, handsome, somewhat animal- 
looking man of five-and-thirty. His was 
the beauty of feature seen so often among 
Russian men, coupled with a radiance of 
health and good fortune, quite remarkable. 
His eyes, startlingly blue in his sunburned 
face, were shaded by long, coarse, black 
lashes, and under his short moustache his 
finely-cut, satiny red lips wore an expression 
of intelligent self-satisfaction and cynical 
good-nature. 

He had not noticed Mrs. Drummond, be- 
yond thinking, “What a get-up !” but she did 
not forget him, nor the conquering swing of 
his great shoulders. She knew that love of 
beauty is not a quality that pleases God ; she 
knew that Samuel had always said, of how 
trifling an importance looks are, compared 
to those treasures of the soul — humility, 
generosity, self-sacrifice. But, at the same 
time, the beauty of Serge Troumetskoi and 
97 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

his quality of mellow humanity worked po- 
tently in her mind. 

When, at about three o’clock, she woke 
up, she rose greatly refreshed, and by four 
o’clock she was seated in a droschky, being 
driven to the big German shop where she 
was told she could buy anything. 

The rain had ceased, but the villainous 
streets were more like rivers than thorough- 
fares. The low carriage jolted along in a 
perfect shower of mud, the velvet-coated 
driver yelling and beating his beasts un- 
ceasingly. 

The street was thronged with people of 
all nations, all wearing either top boots or 
huge rubber overshoes, and the poverty- 
stricken Celestials recalled to Mrs. Drum- 
mond’s mind the Chinamen, the dear, good, 
Christian Chinese at the Mission. The big 
men of the North are very different from 
those of Harbin, where, in fact everyone ex- 
cept the casual tourist appears to have been 
chosen as a representative type of the ras- 
cality of his nation. 


98 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

The droschky stopped in front of a big 
shop, and she went in. A young man who 
spoke English conducted her to the millinery 
department, and she beheld, it seemed to her, 
the most marvellous mourning bonnets in 
the world. They were, however, appall- 
ingly dear. Samuel would be shocked if he 
knew. She hoped he did not know. 

Taking off her own bonnet, she tried the 
new ones on, slowly, carefully, enjoying it 
very much. Her face was flushed, her 
hands shook a little, timidly she loosened her 
hair over her ears. No, that bonnet was 
too large. As she laid it down, a clanking 
sound caught her ear, and, turning nerv- 
ously, she saw the big officer of the morn- 
ing, accompanied by another man. 

As he passed, he glanced at her, she saw 
in the glass to which she quickly returned. 

“Look what pretty hair," he said in 
French to his companion, his eyes fixed on 
her in the mirror, with bold admiration. 
Then he was gone and Lily sank into a chair. 
“Pretty hair !” And those two ladies in the 
99 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

train had said she was pretty. Oh, well, — 
going back to one of the bonnets which she 
had rejected as too dear, she put it on. It 
was small and of the shape known once upon 
a time as “Mary Queen of Scots" ; that is to 
say, it came in a point low down upon her 
brow, and in it was a ruche of soft white 
crepe. 

“I'll take this one," she said suddenly, in a 
rather loud voice. “I’ll wear it, and you 
may send the other to the hotel." Then she 
added: “Will you tell me where I can get a 
dress, ready made, and a jacket?" 

If Samuel was astonished by this remark- 
able proceeding, it is safe to say that that ex- 
cellent shade was no more astonished than 
his relict, when she found a young woman 
with a necklace of pearls as big as hothouse 
grapes, squeezing her into a very tight black 
gown, of a material soft and clinging, that 
she had never before seen. The dress was 
not so marvellously beautiful as Mrs. Drum- 
mond thought, but it had one advantage; it 
was so cut that it displayed to the greatest 
ioo 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

effect the supple curves of her long, pretty 
figure. 

“I — my stays are very tight/’ she said 
with a smile. 

“O madame,” protested the girl, whose 
own waist was half the size of her patron’s, 
and Mrs. Drummond blushed for her own 
ignorance. 

A very loose, black coat, lined with squir- 
rel, or some animal excellently disguised as 
such, completed her purchases, and after 
paying the terrifying bill with tight-set lips, 
she swept out of the shop, unrecognised by 
the young man who had received her on her 
entrance. 

The sun had come out, the rivers and 
lakes in the streets were gleaming with gold ; 
the sky, piled with glistening white clouds, 
was a brilliant blue. 

Lily Drummond sang to herself, as she 
held her skirts out of the filthy straw at the 
bottom of the droschky: 

“ ‘O Jesus, thou our help, 

O Jesus, thou our friend/ ” 

IOI 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

The words were of the friendly banality 
dear to Mr. Brady, but the music was not 
the old hymn tune. The music was new and 
worldly, and bubbled up warm, from the 
young woman’s flattered vanity. 

“I am pretty,” she said under her breath, 
“and I’m glad; I don’t believe it’s wicked to 
be pretty; I believe that Samuel was mis- 
taken.” 

This was the rankest heresy to which her 
soul had ever given birth. Samuel mis- 
taken ! 

But in her room her spirits fell, as any 
spirits would have done in that depressing 
apartment; so she wept a little and prayed a 
little. Fortified by supper, she cheered up, 
and the new clothes again appeared to her 
to contain elements of joy and strength. 

When Mrs. Pinker’s letter arrived, con- 
taining that lady’s ticket to be exchanged if 
possible, she was able to write a very pleas- 
ant answer to it, regretting that it was too 
late to take any steps about the ticket, and 
hoping that the minister would soon recover. 

102 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

Under the influence of the new clothes, the 
minister’s behaviour in falling ill with 
typhoid looked to her far less reprehensible 
than it had done from under the shadow of 
the bedraggled veil. 

The moon came up clearly, bringing with 
it a cold, biting wind. Mrs. Drummond 
reached the station an hour too soon for her 
train, and as soon as she was allowed to go 
through to the platform, did so. Her com- 
partment, which, through Mrs. Pinker’s de- 
fection she was to have to herself, looked 
palatial to her, and the respectful manner of 
the guard was like balm. 

‘That old lady was right,” she thought; 
“it’s the clothes.” 

For she felt very grand indeed. Too rest- 
less to sit down, she went out again and be- 
gan walking up and down the long platform. 

Ten minutes before the train started, a 
tall man in a fur-collared coat and grey 
clothes, came across the line, and, while his 
servant went on ahead with his luggage, 
paused and lit a cigarette. It was the big 
103 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

officer en civil, and he was going in the train. 

Throwing away his match, he caught 
sight of her, and with a twist of his mous- 
tache, stared. It was, she saw, a new stare ; 
he had not recognised her. 

His first glance that morning in the hotel 
had been merely indifferent. The look in 
the shop had been one of condescending ad- 
miration of her curly hair. 

This stare, she knew, was quite different. 
It meant admiration of her as a pretty and 
well-dressed woman. 

She walked on quietly, flushing but unof- 
fended, where a more experienced woman 
would have been angry, or a finer-fibred one, 
insulted. Truth compels the statement 
that the little missionary was pleased and 
flattered at the tribute, and Serge Troumet- 
skoi for his part, raised his eyebrows and 
said something in Russian which means “X 
la bonne heure.” 


104 


XIV 


In order fully to appreciate this instructive 
tale, the reader is begged to realise that 
even to an old and . luxurious traveller the 
Trans-Siberian International Express is in 
some ways a revelation of comfort. That 
is, the carriages are new and clean; there is 
more overhead room for luggage than in 
any other train in the world; the beds are 
wide and comfortable, and the service excel- 
lent. 

It will therefore be seen that Lily Drum- 
mond, installed in a first class compartment, 
found herself in Paradise. She came from 
the plainest kind of a home; since leaving 
that home, she had been subjected to the un- 
believable discomfort of travelling in the 
Far East; she had been half starved for 
days. Add to these things that she had by 
chance never in her life even seen a sleeping 

105 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

carriage, and you will be able, more or less 
accurately, to gauge her feelings. To her, 
the art nouveau decorations were beautiful; 
the crooked panelling and the grotesque 
stained glass, marvels of artistic expression, 
and the very bed on which she slept, a mys- 
tery, almost a poem, in its complicated ar- 
rangements. 

Before she got into bed, she stood for a 
long time in front of the glass in the door, 
looking at herself, tall and slim in her thick 
white nightgown. Her curly hair, well 
brushed and plaited in two tails, her small 
face bore something of the look of a tired 
child’s. But what so interested her was the 
marvellous new fact that she was pretty. 
As if with strange eyes, she gazed at herself, 
and, after a long pause, she said aloud: 
“Yes, it is true.” 

The comfortable train forged ahead, easy 
on its strong springs, and in her bed, Mrs. 
Drummond, having knelt by it to pray, fell 
asleep, her mind filled for the first time in her 
life by thoughts of her physical self. 

106 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

The next morning she woke up to find the 
conductor standing by her, smiling pleas- 
antly. 

“The breakfast is over,” he said in 
French. “Si madame veut son cafe au 
lit . . .?” 

Lily drew the sheet up close under her 
chin. No white man but Samuel had ever 
seen her in bed, and she was ashamed. But 
the conductor’s respectful friendliness reas- 
sured her, and she drank her coffee and ate 
her bread and butter with a good appetite. 

An hour later she went into the corridor 
and sat down on a little folding seat while 
her bed was being made. 

It was a fine, clear day and the ugly Man- 
churian landscape was pleasant to look upon. 
The sky was blue and the few trees clean 
from recent rain. The rapid movement of 
the train exhilarated the young woman, who 
happened to be a born traveller, though she 
had hitherto had no means of discovering 
the fact, and the world looked to her, as she 
sped through it, a goodly heritage indeed. 
107 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

In this beautiful train she was no longer so 
afraid as she had been ; she was not hungry, 
and she was wearing the new frock. 

Presently a little girl with very bony 
knees and an absurdly short skirt, came and 
talked to her. 

“What’s your name?” asked the child, 
shortly, with a twang. “Mine is Lucile 
Helene Butts, and I am eight.” 

“Mine is Lily Drummond, and I am 
twenty-eight.” 

“My mommer’s name is Clara, and she is 
thirty. Have you any little girls?” 

“No.” Lily spoke unregretfully. 

“You must be very lonely. Are you all 
alone? Do you do your hair up in pins?” 
pursued the child, her sharp eyes darting 
suspiciously at Lily’s hair. 

“No, it grows that way.” 

“Oh! Have you got a gold watch?” 

“No. What an inquisitive little girl you 
are!” Mrs. Drummond was gently bored, 
although she had never used the word in her 
life. 


108 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

“Intelligent children always ask ques- 
tions,” returned Miss Butts glibly; “Momma 
says so.” 

Just then the tall man in grey came out of 
his compartment, which Lily saw was next 
hers. He wore a peculiarly fresh aspect and 
held up his head like a conqueror of worlds. 
But it was not a conquering spirit that 
caused that uplift of his chin. It was the 
consciousness that no matter how much he 
chose to drink over-night, he could feel and 
look quite fit the next morning. The cleft 
in his big chin caught Lily’s eye as he 
passed. A moment later she sat again in 
her compartment. She heard his voice, a 
deep smooth voice, with a note of com- 
mand in it, softened by his un-English 
accent. 

“How old are you, Miss Lacy-Skirts ?” 
he asked banteringly. 

And Miss Butts’s shrill pipe gave instant 
answer. 

“And is this pretty lady your sister?” 

It was, he knew, a banal method of ap- 
109 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

proach, but apparently it would, in the pres- 
ent case, suffice. _ 

It did. Blushing to her ears, Mrs. Drum- 
mond withdrew to the farthest corner of her 
seat and leaned against the window. 

“Oh, no," Miss Lacy-Skirts returned with 
a giggle ; “I haven't any sisters ; I am an only 
child. That girl is — I don't know — Lily 
something, she said. I suppose she's in 
mourning. I wonder who's dead." 

“Hush!" 

Lily was grateful to him for the word, 
but she was glad when he stopped speaking. 
Her head was hob and she felt vaguely up- 
set. 

Taking a book from her bag, she began 
to read. But the book was dull and failed to 
hold her unstable attention. It was so queer 
that he should be there, in the compartment 
next hers, and he was so handsome. Sam- 
uel had been handsome, too, but somehow 
his face did not make one feel as this man's 
did. 

She wondered in absolute ignorance, what 

no 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

the difference was, and at lunch time, when 
she found herself given a corner table and 
that the big man was just behind her, she 
deliberately turned her back to him and sat 
facing the wall. But she had reckoned 
without the mirror, which often happens in 
this world, a fact on which volumes might 
be written. 

In the mirror the big man's blue eyes were 
fixed steadily on hers. It was very confus- 
ing. The food seemed strangely elaborate 
to her and the haughty waiter showed disap- 
proval as she said she did not want any wine. 

Now, Mrs. Drummond, though confused 
by the newness of things, was not naturally 
timid, and five minutes had not passed be- 
fore her calmness 'had returned, and while 
many women would have been annoyed or 
even frightened by the bold homage in the 
man's gaze, she was, after the first minute, 
only puzzled. It pleased her to be stared at, 
and she wondered if it was wrong for her to 
be pleased. She had, remember, never 
heard other women tell their experiences; 


hi 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

she had never heard any man resent his 
women-folk being stared at, for the women- 
kind among whom her lot had been cast were 
not of those who attract marauding glances, 
and her old grandmother had lived, in spite 
of the exigencies of the cafe, in almost 
cloistral solitude, keeping the child with her 
every moment, and guarding her with af- 
fectionate care, but at the same time watch- 
ing her with the hawk’s eyes of one who 
knows. 

Her only books had been those in the 
Bibliotheque Rose, and after her marriage, 
half-a-dozen of Walter Scott’s novels, Mrs. 
Hemans’ delicious poems, and semi — or al- 
together religious works. 

An imaginative person observing her in 
the wagon-lit that day in Manchuria would, 
if aware of those few fundamental facts, 
have thought — “Marguerite, despite her 
twenty-odd years, and the Devil seeking 
amusement for himself.” But the imagina- 
tive person would have been, as imaginative 
persons so often are, quite wrong. 

1 12 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

Serge Troumetskoi was bored to death, 
and Lily, to his eyes, distinctly alluring. 
The back of her neck, between the black of 
her dress and her hair, was marvellously 
white. The line from her hip to her knee 
was, too, he had seen, very fine; and Mos- 
cow was ten days away. 

So all through luncheon she felt his eyes 
were on her in the glass, and when, once in 
a while, she raised her own eyes, a queer lit- 
tle tremor went over her. 

But when she went back to her compart- 
ment she closed the door and again tried to 
read her dull book. 

“I am a goose," she told herself at last, 
aloud, dropping the book, an endless chroni- 
cle of the uninteresting virtues of an unin- 
teresting man, born without any capacity 
for anything but uninteresting virtue, on her 
knees. 

‘There surely is nothing in the fact that 
that man thinks me pretty, to make me feel 
so — so — unlonely,” she thought. “It isn't as 
if I knew him and had him to talk to; it’s 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

just nonsense, and I wonder what Samuel 
would say.” But it was none the less true 
that from this time on all yearning for Sam- 
uel’s strong wing ceased utterly. 

At dinner the big man’s eyes again pur- 
sued her, and once or twice she was hard put 
to it not to smile, which of course would have 
been utterly disgraceful. 

An old German woman sat at her table 
this time, in front of the mirror, and Lily 
answered her remarks politely enough, but 
she wished the old German woman had not 
sat just there. 

After dinner the train stopped an hour at 
the Siberian frontier for the luggage to be 
examined. When her boxes had been 
passed, Mrs. Drummond, well wrapped in 
her fur-lined coat, began to walk up and 
down the platform. It had rained and the 
mud was deep, but she wanted exercise. 

Passing the train, she went on into the 
darkness, watching now the starlit sky, now 
the shifting trains on her right. 

Suddenly she heard on the stone coping 
114 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

behind her a strong, firm tread, and for one 
second she longed to fly. She knew that it 
was the big man and she felt that he would 
speak to her. What he did was most un- 
expected. 

Flashing a pocket electric lantern across 
the platform, he said quietly : 

'There is a positive lake in front of you, 
Mademoiselle; I feared you might step into 
it.” Then they were again in the darkness 
and he went on in a gentle voice : "It is very 
wet.” 

Still she did not speak, and after a pause 
he said : 

"I am Prince Serge Troumetskoi. Per- 
haps as you are alone, you will allow me to 
be of some use to you?” 

"Thank you. You are very kind,” she 
Stammered. 

He laughed. "Kind? Not I — I am 
lonely. Will you not take my arm?” 

She did so. So he was a Prince. It all 
seemed quite natural. 


“But — I am not Mademoiselle, Monsieur le 
Prince,” she stammered, a few minutes later, 
as they sat In her compartment, “I am a 
widow.” 

He had assumed her to be a widow, judg- 
ing by her bonnet, but it is, to men of his 
stamp, one of the banal rules of the game to 
assume that all attractive women are un- 
married. 

“Pauvre enfant,” he murmured, his red 
lips moving very slightly under his big 
moustache, “you are very young to be a 
widow. You are going home?” 

Tears, as much nervous as sorrowful, 
rushed to her eyes. 

“Ah — no — I have no home. “I am going 
to — to Clapham. To his father and 
mother.” 

II 1 6 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

Troumetskoi knew his London well, and 
he had heard of Clapham. 

“Ah, mon Dieu! But you will not like 
Clapham; you will not be at home there.” 

Suddenly she clasped her hands and 
looked up at him, forgetting him for the mo- 
ment, and only remembering her own 
future. 

“Oh,” she cried, “you know it? You have 
been there? Tell me about it.” 

“But no, I have never been there. No 
one has. It is a mysterious and awful 
place, known only to its own inhabitants.” 
He laughed. “Where did you learn such 
French?” he went on. “It is not the French 
of Stratford-atte-Bowe.” 

“No, I have never been to Stratford. My 
mother was French, and until I was married 
I lived at Boulogne with my grandmother.” 

She had taken off her coat, and sat very 
upright, facing him. She looked, he 
thought, like a Tanagra statuette in black. 
If she were well dressed her figure would be 
marvellous. 

1 17 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

“And you have lived in China since your 
marriage ?” 

“Yes. We were missionaries.” 

“Sapristi !” The man’s curiosity was 
really piqued. He was full of superficial 
lore about life in its less noble aspects; he 
thought that he knew women very thor- 
oughly, but something in this girl puzzled 
him. 

“That is,” she went on, wondering at her 
former phrase, “we are missionaries.” 

“And you — converted the Chinese?” 

“Yes,” she answered, with the simple 
faith of her class. 

He rose. “I wish you a very good night, 
Madame,” he said, with the utmost respect, 
“and, until to-morrow, good-bye.” 

When he had gone she closed the door. 
Then, feeling very weary and disappointed, 
she sat down again. 

“I wonder why he went,” she thought, 
“and why he was so strange at the last.” 

She would have been vastly amazed if 
anyone had told her that his sudjden access 
118 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

of respect had disappointed her. This was 
the case. 

As for Troumetskoi, he went into the 
restaurant and sat for an hour with a vodka 
bottle and a glass, cursing the Fates who 
had put such a soul as the little widow’s into 
such a body as hers. 

“A missionary, by God!” he thought, “of 
all things on earth, and believing that she 
converted the Chinese. Oh, la, la !” 

He was more than annoyed, he was al- 
most indignant; but he had given up the 
game and was making up his mind to a soli- 
tary journey, not, be it understood, that re- 
spect for the status of missionary withheld 
him from further pursuit of Mrs. Drum- 
mond; it was simply that a woman \yhose 
mind, whose spirit could allow her to be- 
come a missionary could not, he thought, be 
sufficiently attuned to his spirit to make even 
a casual flirtation possible. 

So two disappointed people went moodily 
to bed within ten feet of each other, and the 
wheels of the train kept on turning. 

119 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

The next day was amazingly long and 
lonely for Lily Drummond. The Prince, as 
she of course called him in her mind, not at 
all sure that he was not of royal birth, 
bowed to her most courteously, paused at 
her table and asked her if she had slept well. 

But he no longer stared at her, and this 
made her angry and sore. 

“I suppose he didn't think me pretty close 
to," she thought resentfully ; and all through 
the long day she thought of nothing but the 
man and his strange behaviour. 

She slept badly, and as soon as she woke, 
went into her little dressing-room, deter- 
mining, as she splashed about in the tiny 
place, that she would, if the Prince spoke to 
her, treat him very coolly. 

Troumetskoi, meantime, had put her 
quite out of his mind, and was, as he shaved 
himself, laughing over a picture in a very 
coarse paper that he had bought the day be- 
fore. 

And Lily Drummond would without a 
doubt have lived the life of Clapham all the 
120 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

rest of her days, but for a trick Fate played 
on her a moment or two later. 

She had not noticed the little door leading 
out of the dressing-room, opposite her own; 
she had not realised that she shared the 
dressing-room with the occupant of the next 
compartment — T roumetskoi. 

Thinking that the place belonged entirely 
to her, she went back into her compartment, 
leaving the door wide open and, her blue 
cotton crepe kimono unfastened from her 
throat down, began to twist up her hair. 

It is well known that no attitude so well 
shows off a beautiful figure as the one with 
the arms raised and curved to the head. 
With a long coil of hair twisted in one hand, 
she turned to reach the hairpins hanging in 
a little case over her bed, and Troumetskoi, 
opening his door of the dressing-room at that 
moment, saw her young white body in all its 
beauty, outlined against the blue kimono. 

He stood for a second motionless; then 
with a little scream, she saw him, and he 
slammed his door. 


121 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

Dropping her hair, she lay down on the 
bed and burst into helpless sobs, sobs as 
genuine as ever were sobs in this world. 
She felt outraged, insulted, blackened. She 
felt that never again could she look a man 
in the face; not even Samuel had ever seen 
her naked. 

Troumetskoi, for his part, finished his 
toilet with a heightened colour and a puzzled 
frown. To think that she should be a mis- 
sionary! But, missionary or no mission- 
ary, she was adorable, and — 

She did not appear at lunch, and during 
the long afternoon he stayed warily in his 
own compartment. 

Some apologies are much better made in 
the evening. 

She had her dinner brought to her, and 
about half-past nine, as she sat drearily 
looking out of the window, her door was 
quietly opened, the light switched on, the 
door closed, and Troumetskoi, sitting down 
by her, took her right hand firmly in his. 

1 22 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

“Dear Madame,” he said rapidly, “I can- 
not apologise for what was no fault of mine, 
and without being a liar, I could not say 
that I regret it. But — I am deeply grieved 
by your grieving, and I beg you to try and 
forget. In return,” he raised her hand to 
his lips and brushed his moustache lightly 
across it, “I promise you to try to forget 
what was — the most beautiful sight I have 
ever seen in my life.” 

“O Prince !” She was incapable of 
words ; his assault was so sudden and so skil- 
ful that her head reeled. 

“That you are divinely beautiful you may 
not know,” he hurried on, “but I know, and 
still I will try to forget if — if you will.” 

For a moment she gazed out on the moon- 
lit moorland in which the flaming birches 
glowed like gold. 

“Divinely beautiful!” She, Lily Drum- 
mond, ^divinely beautiful!” And he, this 
Prince, had seen her without any clothes on. 
Horror and rapture were for a moment in- 
123 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

distinguishable from each other in her 
whirling mind, and then rapture won the 
day. 

“I will try to forget," she told him. 
“But, — please let us never talk about it 
again." 

And once more he kissed her hand. This 
time she felt his lips under his moustache. 

“That child said your name was Lily; is 
it? Lily, Lily," he repeated softly. Then 
he rose. “It is late — I will go. Good 
night, Madame," he finished ceremoniously, 
“and I thank you." 


XVI 


Lily Drummond woke the next morning 
with the words “divinely beautiful” ringing 
in her ears. It was a splendid and intoxi- 
cating thing to be divinely beautiful, and she 
enjoyed it to the tips of her little brown fin- 
gers. She had been married for years and 
yet, mentally, she had only now become a 
woman; and that this magnificent man, this 
Prince, considered her beautiful changed 
her whole aspect of life. In every fibre of 
her she felt youth, health and beauty. 

The sun shone brightly and seemed, as 
she stood by the window, to be centred on 
her little self. 

The train stopped, and she heard sud- 
denly from the dressing-room that she had 
vacated herself only a few minutes before, 
a soft baritone voice staging, so high as to 

125 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

be almost in the tenor register, an air she 
vaguely remembered: 

“Si tu m’aimes, 

Carmen.” 

She had never heard an opera; she had 
never heard an orchestra. It must have 
been her old grandmother who had sung 
this scrap of one of the world’s masterpieces. 
For since her marriage her only music had 
been hymns, and now she realised suddenly, 
but quite unmistakably, that she had never 
liked hymns. 

“Si tu m’aimes, 

Carmen.” 

The man’s voice was untrained but melo- 
dious. At the end of the phrase he sang 
out, and the final notes brought the blood to 
his hearer’s cheeks, as he meant them to do. 

“I wonder if he’s married,” she thought, 
with a sudden and unexpected fierceness. 
For a moment she stood with clenched hands 
and drawn brows, and then with her old 
126 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

cry, “How silly I am !” she went in to break- 
fast without an idea of what it was that had 
happened. 

Troumetskoi knew, he, — as the French 
put it. He was in love again, and he was 
glad; for to men of his temperament it is a 
tremendous bore to be out of love. The 
woman was beautiful, young, and although 
a missionary, he no longer doubted her 
capability of understanding; for, he argued 
primitively, a woman built like that could 
not be a cold-blooded prig. 

He was an essentially simple creature, 
this big Russian, who reasoned from his 
senses to his mind; he was a genial, kindly, 
unscrupulous, animal, generous, selfish be- 
ing. He was a man of honour, brave, even 
foolishly so, and his boast was that he had 
never deceived a girl. But a woman? 
Why not ? 

“They have brains as well as we, — or 
think they have, dear little things. I am 
not a criminal,” and reasoning on these 
lines, he would not have been ashamed if his 
127 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

own mother had known what he was about, 
regarding Lily Drummond. The old 
Princess, indeed, would, had she known, 
have shrugged her virtuous shoulders and 
murmured something about “Ces folles 
Anglaises” and wondered how Serge could 
find anything attractive in one of them. 

But Lily was to him quite extraordinarily 
attractive. Her beauty was of the kind that 
made strong appeal to him, and there was 
about her a certain mystery that piqued his 
curiosity more than it had been piqued for 
years. She was a missionary; she was, he 
saw, more truthful than most women; he 
knew T by the instinct that is so much stronger 
than any mere reasoning, that she had lived 
a perfectly blameless life. 

And yet there were in her possibilities of 
a very different nature, and although his be- 
ginning had been so successful, although his 
attraction for her was perfectly visible to 
him, he now found himself at a loss how to 
continue his campaign, and this added a 
marvellous zest to the affair. 

128 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

Lake Baikal lay spread, for hours, under 
the train windows ; beautiful, vast, blue 
waters, too much like the sea to be regarded 
as a lake; and the birches, beloved of Tolstoi, 
tbuched by the hands of September, blazed 
like yellow torches amongst the changeless 
pines. 

That one day was beautiful, and Troumet- 
skoi, who loved nature, sat for two hours 
before lunch with Mrs. Drummond, gazing 
out of the window. She found him rather 
silent, and, to be strictly truthful, she found 
him rather dull, that day. When he was 
audacious and masterful, some new thing 
within her responded and understood; but 
when he sat frowning at the blue water be- 
neath the golden trees, she was at a loss. 
Nature to her was a closed book, and she 
had lived so long by the ocean, that she no 
more thought of gazing at it for hours than 
she — or for that matter anybody else — 
thought of gazing for hours at the sky. 

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” he asked her occa- 
sionally. 


129 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

And she answered without even feigning 
enthusiasm, “Oh, yes." 

They always spoke French together and 
to her the use of the language of her girl- 
hood had a strange charm, as if she had 
gone back into the years, as if she were quite 
a different woman from the missionary who 
had spoken English. 

But though silent, the man was by no 
means thinking only of the beauties of the 
autumn day. Almost at once he felt that 
his attitude piqued his companion, and none 
knew better than he the value of pique in 
matters of love. It was out of her obviously 
sincere character, as a missionary, to resent 
his abstracted respect of manner, but her re- 
sentment was thoroughly in keeping with 
that other character whose existence he 
vaguely felt. And that other character was 
the one in keeping with his ends. So, de- 
liberately, he sat staring out of the window, 
his fine profile turned to hers. 

Presently she took up her book and with 
crimson cheeks began to read. Her lips 

130 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

were parted and her fingers nervous. 
These things he saw and after a moment he 
rose, and with a polite word or two, left 
her. 

When he had gone, she lay down with her 
face in the pillow. 

“If I am divinely beautiful,” she repeated 
over and over again, “why does he treat me 
like this?” She was hurt and angry and 
felt as if a door had been slammed in her 
face. 

He, meantime, smoked, and smiled to him- 
self occasionally. 

“£a marche,” he thought, “ga marche.” 

At Irkutsk they changed trains, and he 
took the occasion to speak to her again. 
“Might he be of use in calling a porter to 
carry her bag?” and so forth, and “would 
she like to walk up and down and get some 
air?” 

But in her anger, she refused frigidly, 
and when she had established herself in the 
other train, went out again, for there is a 
long stop at that delectable town, and started 

131 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

to walk alone. She was in the depths of an- 
gry despair and ready to believe he would 
never again speak to her, when suddenly 
their positions were reversed and the whip 
was thrust into her ready hand. 

“Mrs. Drummond !” 

Wheeling round, she found herself look- 
ing into the face of one Jasper O'Neill, a 
Chinese Customs man, who was an old 
friend of one of the missionaries in China, 
and who, after a fever, had once stayed with 
those friends for a month. 

It all came back to her in a moment, the 
pleasant autumn days three years ago, 
when O'Neill helped with the singing at the 
Mission, and once even sang some mildly 
secular songs to the accompaniment of a 
wheezy harmonium. He had been a cheer- 
ful, rather racketty youth, and not at all ap- 
proved of by Samuel Drummond, but 
secretly enjoyed by Lily; and here he was at 
Irkutsk. 

“Mr. O'Neill !" Her luminous eyes 
flashed with real pleasure, as they shook 

132 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

hands. “You are going on in our train?” 
she asked presently. 

“Only as far as — ,” a name she did not 
catch. “A pal of mine is ill there and I am 
going to look him up.” 

They walked back and in the crowd came 
Serge Troumetskoi who, on seeing them, 
stopped short and then turned away. 

Mrs. Drummond had seen his face and 
the moment was a mile-stone on her road; 
the unsophisticated little missionary knew 
from out the depths of inherited lore, trace- 
able surely to Eve herself, that Troumetskoi, 
who had neglected and hurt her, was jeal- 
ous; and as composedly as if she had spent 
her life in the polite intrigue of drawing- 
rooms, she said with a bubble of laughter, as 
they passed the Russian: “Oh, Mr. O’Neill, 
I am so glad to see you.” 

O’Neill glanced at her, a little surprised. 
This tone was new to him. Later, seated in 
her compartment, he ventured to tell her she 
had changed. 

“I am older — ” 


133 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

“No; it’s not that, but you used to be such 
a little Puritan, — and now — ” 

She laughed. “And now — ?” 

“Well, I don’t know — you’re more like 
other girls.” 

Troumetskoi passed the door as she spoke, 
and Lily looked up at the young Irishman in 
a way that would have made the estimable 
Samuel turn in his grave, if he had seen it. 
On the other hand, her forgotten mother 
would have chuckled, as people do in seeing 
their own engaging little wickednesses re- 
produced in their offspring, and Troumet- 
skoi writhed as, followed by another of her 
delicious bursts of laughter, he went on to 
his compartment. 

O’Neill dined with Lily, and it must be 
confessed that the sight of the Russian’s 
furious white face in the glass added a keen 
edge to the young woman’s appetite. 

As for O’Neill, an amorous Irishman, 
“fed up” — as he would have said — with the 
solitude of nearly two years spent some- 
where up the Yang-tse, he lost his head. 

*34 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

He told Lily she was beautiful, and he 
must see her the following year in England, 
and towards the end of the meal he sent for 
champagne and made her drink some. She 
had never tasted it before, but her mother 
had, and she liked it. It reddened her 
cheeks and brightened her eyes, and lent to 
O’Neill’s words a pleasant vagueness; and 
just before they left the table he uttered a 
phrase that was destined to become a kind 
of mental catchword to her: “You little 
devil!” he said. 

And Lily was delighted. “A little devil !” 
She had thought herself a missionary, but 
it seemed she was not one; she was a little 
devil. 

When O’Neill, most unwillingly, got out 
of the train, two hours further along the 
line, and stood watching the express leave 
the station, Lily leaned from the window 
and waved her hand to him. It was a moon- 
lit night and the sleeping world was lovely. 

Suddenly someone came in and slammed 
the door. 


135 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

“Who is that man?” Troumetskoi asked 
harshly. 

She turned, laughing. For a moment she 
did not answer, but eyed him, revelling in 
her new sense of power. 

“Who is he?” 

“His name is O’Neill. He is an old 
friend.” 

He came closer and took her hands in his, 
holding them to his breast. Something in 
her eyes changed his manner, as if by magic. 

“You little devil!” he said. 


XVII 


“Funny— that’s what he called me!” she 
said, disengaging her hands gently and sit- 
ting down. “Nobody ever called me that 
before.” 

“Perhaps,” he answered, wiping his fore- 
head with his handkerchief, “you never were 
one before.” 

“How do you mean?” 

“I mean — well — ” Her manner had quite 
relieved his mind, for her eyes had been 
unable to continue meeting his, and she had 
blushed under his gaze. 

After a pause he went on, enjoying these 
preliminaries as a gourmet enjoys the hors 
d’ceuvres of his dinner. 

“You puzzled me very much at first. I 
am beginning to understand you, I think.” 

Her eyes grew dreamy. “Are you? I 
137 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

am just beginning not to. Tell me about 
myself." 

He loved talking — Troumetskoi — and he 
talked fluently. 

“Eh bien, in the first place you are a mis- 
sionary, or you were one, and that is so 
strange." 

“Strange?" Deeply interested in that 
most interesting study — herself — her eyes 
were like stars. 

“Yes, tell me why you chose to be a mis- 
sionary." 

“But I didn't choose it. Samuel was one 
before he married me, so of course I was one 
too." 

Troumetskoi threw back his head with a 
little shout of triumph. 

“Voila! There it is! There you have it. 
My theory has never failed before and it 
does not fail this time. Listen, I will tell 
you. Do not interrupt." 

Leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, 
his hands clasped, he explained his theory. 

“I believe, I have always believed^ that 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

every person born into this world has a voca- 
tion. It is absolutely certain that Nature 
has intended certain men to be doctors; and 
if a man meant to be a doctor becomes by 
some mistake — and these mistakes, mind 
you, occur continually — a jockey, he is abso- 
lutely bound to be a bad one. 

“Our Tsar, as you English call him, was 
meant to be an excellent, bourgeois pere de 
famille; the German Emperor is a born 
actor, and so on, and so on. Well, I was 
born to be a soldier, with plenty of money, 
and that is what I am, and so I am happy. 

“Now you, my dear Lily, when I met you 
and you told me you were a missionary, I 
was puzzled, for, I take it, small children 
are rarely brought up to be missionaries. I 
assume that it is a profession that must be 
adopted when one is grown, and then you, 
with your looks and your temperament — ” 

“What is ‘temperament’ ?” she asked 
calmly. 

“Well, it is the physical soul — the — an 
affair of imagination and circulation, and — 
139 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

well — you don't look like a woman who would 
enjoy telling the story of the Cross to men 
who crucify some of their criminals to this 
day." 

Lily watched him. “Well, I didn't enjoy 
it exactly," she said simply, “though it was 
very wicked of me. They never listened to 
me, somehow, the way they did to the other 
ladies. I did my best, but my best was bad." 

“Exactly. And do you know why? Be- 
cause you did not find the vocation meant 
for you. You let your husband choose for 
you, and he chose wrong. You should have 
been — well — anything rather than that." 

“I see. And I dare say you are right." 

There was a long pause, and then Trou- 
metskoi laid his hand on hers. 

“Only another case of mistaken vocation. 
They are as the sands of the sea; these cases, 
but it is most rare that a person who has 
started on a wrong vocation gets the chance 
to begin again." 

Lily Drummond started. She was too 
quick-witted not to see that her chance v to 
140 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

begin again was due to the fact that her hus- 
band had died, and she was honestly shocked. 

“But I — I was never unhappy,” she fal- 
tered. “I was quite content there, with 
them, and my husband was an angel to me. 
You mustn’t think — things.” 

Troumetskoi’s eyes met hers very gently, 
but held them steadily until he had quieted 
the little tumult he had roused. 

“I am sure he was,” he answered, “but I 
am glad that you are now to see the world.” 

“I don’t imagine that Clapham is very 
beautiful,” she returned, a little ruefully. 

“No, but Paris is. You may go there 
some day; you’re half French, so what could 
be more natural? Let me tell you what a 
pretty woman’s day ought to be. Let me 
see. You used to get up at eight?” 

“At half-past six.” 

“Ah. And it was cold in winter? And 
your bath was a huge earthenware bowl, in 
which you sat doubled up, with your knees 
under your chin. Well, in Paris you’d be 
wakened, say at nine or half-past ; your maid 
141 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

would open your blinds, the room would be 
warm, you would put on fur-lined slippers 
and a silk dressing-gown, and go to your 
bathroom. It would be of white marble, 
the tub, a hollow in the marble floor, nearly 
as big as your bed and full of warm water 
that smelt of violets. You like the scent of 
violets ?” 

“Yes, oh, yes; go on,” she answered 
eagerly. 

“After your bath probably your maid 
would rub you all over with sweet-scented 
oil of some kind, and then you would go 
back to bed and have your chocolate on a 
small silver tray, — the cup of transparent 
porcelain, — and your letters.” 

“But I never have any letters, — ah, yes, 
the mission ladies will of course write to me 
now,” she concluded with satisfaction. 

“Yes, yes; of course. Eh bien, breakfast 
in bed, a silken duvet over you.” 

He paused, for she was listening breath- 
lessly, and he did not know quite how far 
he dared go. 


142 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

“Well?” 

“Then you would be dressed. Your linen 
would be brought in in a basket, it would 
smell of orris, it would be as thin as the thin- 
nest pocket-handkerchief — and — there would 
be lace on it. Your stays — pardon me — 
would be of satin, very flexible, and on your 
dressing-table would be gold and ivory toilet 
things. Then, while you were dressing,” he 
flushed a deep crimson, “someone would 
come in whom you — cared for.” 

“Oh, you mean my husband?” 

“Y — yes, or if by bad luck he was married 
to someone else, he would be your best friend, 
and you’d go for a walk with him. You 
would lunch in your dining-room, a short, 
very delicious lunch, and afterwards you 
would read, write, or go shopping in your 
electric carriage. Then, in the afternoon, 
after tea, you would rest.” 

“But I shouldn’t be tired,” she interrupted 
naively. “I never sleep in the daytime.” 

“But you would be dining at a big restau- 
rant.” 


143 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

“Tell me what a big restaurant is like. 
I’ve never seen one, you know.” 

He reflected for a moment. “Well, beau- 
tiful walls, tapestried, or gilded and hung 
with satin brocade; many small tables sur- 
rounded by smart people who are mirrored 
and multiplied in big looking-glasses ; mar- 
vellous food and wine, excitement in the air, 
lovers whispering together, beautiful frocks, 
— it is indescribable. Then, after dinner, 
you would go to a theatre, perhaps, and see 
beautiful things. I can’t describe a theatre, 
— don’t ask me to.” He laughed. 

“Yes, and then?” 

“And then — home to bed,” he concluded, 
rather lamely. 

She was silent for a moment and then said 
slowly: “It is all exactly like a fairy tale.” 

“Yes, only fairy tales are impossible.” 
He had fired his own imagination by his 
words, and was breathing quickly. It was 
eleven o’clock and the moon was rather mad- 
dening. 

“Li — ly,” he said to her, softly. 

144 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

“Oh, you mustn’t call me that. I — I was 
thinking about Paris and I forgot you were 
here.” 

“Well, remember me. I want to kiss 
you.” 

And she wanted him to. She knew that, 
and was amazed, but her training had had 
its effects. 

“No, it would be wicked,” she stammered. 
“He has only been dead a month.” 

Troumetskoi’s face hardened. “What 
does that matter? I want to kiss you, and 
you want me to, that is enough.” 

But she set her lips stubbornly. “No, I 
will not let you. I have done very wrong in 
talking to you so long. Please go.” 

He rose. “Very well, I will go — but — 
I will not come back.” 

For a second she faltered and then, seeing 
by his face that he was suffering, she was, 
of course, suddenly strengthened. 

“That must be as you like,” she said qui- 
etly. “Good night.” 

Without speaking, he went. 

145 


XVIII 


All the next day Serge Troumetskoi kept 
his word and did not go near Mrs. Drum- 
mond. 

And because things are just as they are 
in this wicked world (there is no better rea- 
son than just this, for many things over 
which foolish wise people waste hours of 
reasoning!) the longer he stayed away the 
more she missed him. 

The hours dragged. Seated in her cor- 
ner, her unseeing eyes fixed on the land- 
scape, her mental eyes, those eyes which in 
spite of the worthy Wordsworth are more 
often the curse than the bliss of solitude, 
gazed at the pictures the man’s ready words 
had painted for her the evening before. 

It was the idea of the long bath tub that 
most attracted her. She had never seen a 
bath tub other than the battered round tin 
146 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

thing she had inherited from her English 
father, and the earthenware bowls usual in 
the East. 

And to lie in warm water that smelt of 
violets seemed to her a very dream of delight. 

Indeed, her whole imagination basked in 
the sunshine of the things Troumetskoi had 
told her of ; the delicate linen, like the finest 
pocket-handkerchiefs, the gold and ivory 
dressing-table things; the thin china for her 
morning chocolate. 

And as to being rubbed with scented oil, 
she actually shivered with pleasure at the 
thought. It must be admitted that in his 
way Troumetskoi was an artist. 

By the time evening came, Lily Drum- 
mond was in a tremor of nervous excite- 
ment. There was something in the man’s 
healthy animalism that greatly attracted her, 
and as she watched the sun set in a glory 
of colour, known perhaps only in countries 
where the winters are very cold, she admitted 
as much to herself. 

“I suppose I am very wicked,” she 
147 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

thought, “but I should like him to kiss me.” 

What she had no idea of was that it was 
the hitherto dormant passion in herself that 
responded to his. Even in her thoughts 
now, she spoke French. Small characteris- 
tics that had lain unsuspected in her all her 
life now stirred and woke. She seemed to 
know things she had never learned. She 
knew, for instance, that the Russian’s ab- 
sence hurt him as much as it hurt her; and 
it hurt her intensely. 

But he did not come. So far as she could 
see, the mere man was sunk in the Prince. 

To her, his princedom was something very 
wonderful. 

The man, she felt, had condescended to 
her beauty, but now her coldness had ban- 
ished the man, and in his place ruled the 
Prince, much as the Prince’s rule tortured 
his lesser self. 

And she was very lonely. Her one book 
— for she was no reader and had not thought 
to bring more than one — was dull, and its 
pages breathed boredom to her. 

148 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

For hours she sat and dreamed of the 
man the other side of the gaily-painted par- 
tition that separated her from the Angry 
Prince. 

How charming he was, how well he 
talked ; how strangely his blue eyes gleamed 
in his brown face. And how a sudden deep- 
ening of his voice had made her shiver. She 
wished to shiver again; he had frightened 
her and she wished to be frightened again. 
He had told her of travel, of life in Paris, 
but vaguely she felt that he could tell her 
of worlds far greater. 

Life in Clapham would, she knew, be the 
more dreadful for the brief glimpse she had 
had of other possibilities. The images of 
her father- and mother-in-law leapt, fully de- 
tailed, into her mind, visualised with cruel 
keenness. 

They would repress her and disapprove of 
her; they would make her go to chapel and 
listen to prayers; and suddenly, sitting in 
the now disregarded splendour of her com- 
partment, she told herself that she did not 
149 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

want to go to chapel or to hear prayers. 
They bored her; they had, she realised in a 
flash, always bored her. She remembered 
days and hours at the Mission when she had, 
without knowing it — so closely was her mind 
held by Samuel’s — hated the whole thing. 

She was shocked by this revelation of her 
own abominable wickedness, but she faced 
it unflinchingly. It was true then, what the 
Prince had said; it was not her vocation to 
be a missionary. That was the vocation 
Samuel had chosen for her. 

“The next one,” she exclaimed, her face 
blazing with colour, “I am going to choose 
myself !” 

This great resolve was enough for the 
time. She was tired and hungry, and going 
into the restaurant, she ordered tea. 

A moment later Troumetskoi came in. 

“Bon jour, Madame,” he said politely, his 
heels together. 

“Bon jour, M. le Prince; will you not come 
and talk to me ?” she added hastily, as he was 
150 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

about to pass on. “I have been think- 
ing . . ” 

With another overwhelmingly princely 
bow, he sat down oposite her and looked at 
her with cold eyes. 

“Thinking?” 

“Yes.” Stirring her tea nervously, she 
drew a deep breath. She was pale and 
frightened; her intention failed her. What 
if, after all, he did not suffer in neglecting 
her? Suppose he was simply tired of her? 
She gave a nervous little shiver, and he 
saw it. 

“Tell me,” he said gently. 

“Well, about what you said about my be- 
ing a missionary — about — vocations. I 
— think you were right.” 

“My dear lady, of course I was right!” 
There was in his voice a shade of surprise, 
also, she believed, of a princely kind. “You 
would be wasted in such an existence.” 

“But you see, I am very poor. And, I 
hate old women — ” she paused and then went 
151 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

on hurriedly, “I never knew before that I 
hated old women, but I do. And so I 
couldn’t be a companion. As to being a gov- 
erness — I don’t know enough, and besides, 
I don’t much like children. They make me 
so tired, asking questions.” 

“I see.” His solemnity was prodigious, 
as he listened with bent brows. 

After a pause, she continued. “And I 
thought, perhaps, you would advise me, as 
to the choice of a vocation, I mean.” 

With some difficulty Troumetskoi re- 
strained a laugh. 

“You honor me with your confidence,” he 
said, with a grave aloofness beautiful to be- 
hold. “I will think. It is a serious matter. 
I will reflect, and, — let you know this even- 
ing.” He rose. “Until then, chere Ma- 
dame, good-bye.” 

“Good-bye,” she faltered. 

He seemed so very far away from her, so 
immeasurably her superior, that she could 
have wept, for very self-pity. 

Going back to her compartment, she sat 
152 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

until dinner, thinking aimlessly about the 
future. The past had ceased to occupy her 
mind; it was, like poor Samuel, dead. 

When she went in to dinner, Troumetskoi 
came and asked her if he might dine with 
her. 

“Why not?” he cried gaily; “it is dull to 
be alone, and a sin to be dull in this beautiful 
world !” 

Gone the Prince, gone the superior being 
of lofty mien. Come the gay, enchanting 
person who, she knew, still wanted to kiss 
her. 

“We will have champagne,” he cried, 
“and drown our sorrows. Waiter!” 

The champagne reminded her of O'Neill, 
and O'Neill of Troumetskoi's very obvious 
jealousy a few nights before. The subtle 
sense of power stole back to her; again the 
whip was in her hand. 

“You are right,” she said; “the world is 
splendid. I feel as if I had just been born.” 

He leaned towards her over the table. 
“Pull your hair loose over your ears,” he said 
153 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

softly. 'There, a little more, voila! It is 
lovely hair.” 

"It is very long,” she answered, patting 
it with her thin hands; "it comes below my 
knees.” 

The dinner was in reality rather bad, but 
to her it was good. The red cabbage soup, 
into which one put spoonfuls of sour cream; 
the strange cut of beef; the limp cucumbers 
in the salad — everything was good. 

And the champagne was nectar, straight 
from Olympus. 

"I do like champagne,” she said, suddenly, 
draining her glass. "It makes everything 
seem so easy .” 

"Doesn’t it? But things aren’t all so 
easy. For instance” — he paused, looking at 
her with half-shut eyes. "For instance,” — 
his gaze held hers — "it is not at all easy for 
me to sit quietly here — ” 

Then Lily Drummond made her first con- 
sciously coquettish speech. 

"You are tired of me?” 

"You little demon!” He filled his glass 

154 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

again. “What I want to do — and you know 
it — is to take you in my arms and — kiss you 
to death.” 

It was banal, but it was true, and his voice 
rang with feeling. She laughed, though her 
heart beat hard. 

“Think how shocked these good people 
would be.” 

“Why are you so horrid to me?” Also 
banal, but useful nine times out of ten. 

“I am not horrid.” 

“You are. However, after dinner I shall 
go to my own compartment and lock myself 
away from temptation, so let’s enjoy the 
present. Madame Lily, you are adorable!” 

Her face had fallen, but at his last words 
it cleared. 

“You are very strange, Monsieur — ” 

“Serge. Je m’appelle Serge.” 

“Monsieur Serge, you say queer things.” 

“You make me think queer things. Or no 
— not queer, for it’s part of my vocation to 
love beautiful women.” 

“I am not beautiful.” 

i5S. 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

He smiled. “You are going to be.” He 
waited until the waiter had taken away their 
plates, and then added: “When you have 
loved.” 

“Oh!” For a moment she was fright- 
ened. “But I have. You forget — ” 

He shook his head. “I forget nothing. 
That was only affection and habit. Love is 
very different.” 

“Is it?” she murmured absently. 

“Yes. Come. You don't want any cof- 
fee, do you? Let us go.” 


XIX 


“Love,” repeated Troumetskoi, when they 
were in her compartment, “is very differ- 
ent—” 

She turned. “You seem to know all about 
it. I daresay you have loved a great many 
times.” Her voice was a little sharp, at 
which he covertly smiled. 

“I have loved, thank God, a great many 
women. Men speak of being in love as an 
event. To me, it has always been an event, 
and a most painful one, to be out of love! 
And in that sad case I was when I got into 
this train!” 

Lily did not speak. His voice, as well as 
the champagne, made her head swim. 

“Shall I tell you about it?” he went on. 
“But no, first we must have a liqueur. You 
will like Benedictine.” 

He rang, and until the man had brought 

157 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

the liqueurs, allowed her to sit in silence 
while he watched her face, which was pale 
and tense. 

“Drink that stuff — do you like it?” 

“Oh, yes, it is sweet, and it burns — ” 

“Like love, ma Lily. Listen, like a good 
child, and I will tell you a story. Shall I ?” 

“Yes, please.” 

Folding her hands, she listened through 
the golden haze in which she seemed to be 
floating. And his voice was like music, like 
music of the wicked, worldly kind that she 
had never been allowed to hear. 

“I have been at Tokio for the last two 
years as Military Attache to our Legation. 
And she was there. That is to say, I took 
her with me. Do you understand?” 

“Oh, yes,” murmured Lily indifferently. 
It would not have mattered to her just 
then if he had taken twenty women to 
Tokio. 

“The Jap women are very pretty — I know 
lots of them. But I — no, mine was a Euro- 
pean. She is French — an actress, and one 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

of the most attractive women in the world," 
he went on. “She has a charming house, 
half European, half Japanese, an hour from 
town, by the sea, and we were very happy 
indeed. It lasted eighteen months and then 
— it ended." 

“But why?" 

He shrugged his shoulders. “She tired 
of me. At first I was very miserable; I suf- 
fered tortures for a time. Then we began 
to quarrel, and it ended with a big row. She 
went off the next day with an American 
banker." 

Lily started, horrified through her golden 
haze. “How awful ! What a wicked 
woman !" 

“Not at all. A very good sort in her way. 
Their tempers usually are bad when they are 
annoyed. But she — why she sent me back a 
lot of jewels I had given her, and that, of 
course, is most unusual. By the way — " he 
paused for several seconds, and then, ris- 
ing suddenly, went into his compartment 
through the door by the window. 

159 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

After a moment he reappeared, carrying 
with him some big leather cases. 

“Look,” he cried, opening the top one. 

She had never seen a beautiful jewel in 
her life. Try to realise what that means, 
and then try to realise the surprising glory 
of the barbaric necklet of great emeralds and 
diamonds that he was showing her. It lit- 
erally took her breath away, so that she could 
only put her hands to her throat. 

“You like them? Look at these.” 

In the other cases lay several emerald 
rings and half a dozen bracelets set with 
stones of all colours. 

“Oh!” 

Smiling, he refilled the liqueur glasses. 
“Drink that — it’s good for you.” 

She obeyed him almost unconsciously, her 
eyes fixed on the jewels. When she had set 
down her glass, he flung the necklace round 
her neck. 

“Look at yourself,” he commanded. 

“I — I — they are so beautiful!” 

160 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

“Open your frock at the throat; they are 
meant to lie on the bare skin.” 

Her hands trembled, so he unhooked the 
collar, and tucked it in. Then his hands 
trembled. 

“No — no — make it like a ball-gown,” he 
said.” 

“I have never had a ball-gown.” 

But she had seen pictures, and a moment 
later her white young bosom was bare above 
the black of her frock, and the jewels shone 
and flashed and sparkled on it like fire. 

Then he put the rings on her little hands, 
and the bracelets on her arms, and she stood 
in front of the glass admiring, adoring her 
own beauty, the veriest pagan ever born. 

“Lily — I love you.” 

His arms were round her now, and he 
kissed her. After a moment she pushed him 
away, and stood leaning against the door. 

“I — like being kissed,” she said slowly. 

“Of course you do. Oh, you beauty, you 
darling, come here !” 

161 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 


“But I feel ill— I feel faint.” 

He opened the window and made her sit 
down in the corner. 

“Are you better now?” 

“Yes— no. I feel .ill.” 

“You are not ill. But — Lily, you love 
me.” 

His hoarse voice aroused her, for there 
was in it something very strange to her. 
Something remarkably unlike Samuel’s. 

“Do I?” she asked. 

“Yes. And — that is your vocation, to 
love. To love me.” 

But he had gone too rapidly. She took off 
the necklet, the bracelet and the rings and 
put them back into their cases. Then she 
said very slowly : 

“It may be. You may be right — I don’t 
know. But I will think, and tell you to- 
morrow.” 

“Lily — ” 

“No, you must go now, please.” 

His face set sullenly. “You have sent me 
away once, and got me back,” he said; “you 
162 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

cannot do it twice. I will not be played 
with.” 

“Go,” she returned unmoved. And he 
went. 


163 


XX 


The following morning the breach was 
healed, for Troumetskoi had the wisdom not 
to spoil a waiting game by refusing to wait. 
Lily’s sense of her own power was plainly 
visible to him, and its naivete delighted him. 

From the utter, bare, unimaginative igno- 
rance of her benighted missionary state she 
had leaped, as it were, into a consciousness 
arrived at, as a rule, only after several of the 
experiences precisely the lack of which it 
was that lent this charming person such an 
intimate and peculiar grace. 

She put him to a very real torture, it is 
true, but while he writhed, he watched, and 
the spectacle enchanted him. 

For three days she refused absolutely to 
let him kiss her, or even to take her hand in 
his, and this, as a waste of time, he resented. 
But — her quality was so rare, her develop- 
164 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

ment so butterfly-like, that the shreds of the 
cocoon that, so to speak, still clung to her, 
brought her new brilliance into beautiful, 
though exasperating, relief. 

The three days, therefore, passed not alto- 
gether unpleasantly, and on the evening fol- 
lowing the last of them, Miss Butts stepped 
forth and played the role predestined for 
her. 

It was about nine o’clock, and Troumet- 
skoi, suddenly losing his head and his pa- 
tience, seized Lily’s hand as they sat in her 
compartment, the door open. Just at that 
moment, Miss Butts, whom a heaven-sent 
sore throat had kept cribbed, cabined and 
confined for the last three days, appeared in 
the doorway. She wore round her throat a 
not very becoming wisp of dingy flannel, and 
her curls had given way to dank locks of un- 
even length and greasy consistency. 

“Hello,” she said. 

“Hello,” returned Troumetskoi, still hold- 
ing Lily’s hand in his. 

“I guess I know what you're doing,” re- 

165 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

turned the invalid with a knowing croak; 
“you’re spooning! When’s it going to 
be?” 

“When’s what going to be?” asked Lily, 
laughing, without withdrawing her hand. 

“The wedding! I was bridesmaid once, 
and I wore sky blue and silver slippers. 
My, it was lovely.” 

Troumetskoi burst out laughing. “Go 
away, Miss Butts,” he said; “you are an aw- 
ful child!” 

When the “awful child,” very indignant, 
but having fulfilled her mission, had disap- 
peared, he turned to Lily : 

“Would you like to marry me?” he asked 
curiously. 

She shook her head. “No, thanks — I — 
I’d rather not,” she answered. 

“Amazing woman ! As a matter of fact, 
I have one wife already, and the prejudice of 
society would not permit me to have another. 
But just out of interest I ask you, why not?” 

Her eyes met his unfalteringly. 

“Because — well, I don’t know. I like you 

166 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

very much, but — I shouldn't like being your 
wife." 

That most idiotic quality, retrospective 
jealousy, having its seed sown in the heart 
of every man, Troumetskoi flushed at her re- 
mark, and the big vein between his eye- 
brows swelled and darkened. 

“You didn't mind being Drummond's 
wife — " 

For a moment she reflected with the little 
measured air common to conscientious peo- 
ple. “No — but that was different." 

“How do you mean, 'different' ?" 

She folded her hands. “It is hard to ex- 
plain," she said still in French. Then sud- 
denly she changed to English, as if to suit 
linguistically, the matter of her thoughts. 

“You see, Samuel was very different from 
you. He was as different as — black from 
white, as water from wine, but — he was no 
more different from you than /, this me that 
I am now, is different from the me I was 
when I was a mission-lady." 

She remained silent, her eyes dreamy* as 

167 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

if she expounded more to herself than to 
him, and presently he said, his face clear- 
ing: 

“I see. I am glad that you realise the 
difference.” 

“Oh, yes, I realise it,” she answered, once 
more in French. “How could I help it? It 
is as if I were a different woman. I have 
been wondering what God thinks of it.” 

Undefined Atheist though he was, this 
speech rather shocked the Russian. 

“God probably doesn’t bother to think,” he 
murmured. “He knows, you see.” 

“Oh, yes, of course He knows everything. 
He knows I can’t go back in my mind and 
have missionary feelings again, of course. 
It comforts me to think that. Only — I am 
sure Samuel would be dreadfully grieved if 
he knew,” — she broke off, flushing brightly. 

Troumetskoi, who had been at a loss what 
to say, felt his feet once more on solid 
ground. 

“Why should the late Mr. Drummond be 
grieved,” he asked carelessly, “because you 
1 68 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

have made a more or less amusing acquaint- 
ance on your way to Clapham? Dear lady, 
do not exaggerate. At Berlin, on Tuesday, 
we part company, each, I trust, with a pleas- 
ant souvenir of the other, and we shall prob- 
ably, the world being so large, never meet 
again. Why, therefore, should Mr. Drum- 
mond be grieved ?” 

She stared at him, her mouth quivering, 
the adorable mouth made for laughter. 

“But — but — ” she stammered. 

“Yes?” 

With the cruel pleasure native to his race, 
he watched her face as she struggled to re- 
gain her composure. 

“I— I don’t know— I—” 

“Lily !” He had her in his arms, her face 
against his, and she could feel his heart beat. 
“Lily, I was teasing you. I love you, you 
know I do — and we shall not part at Ber- 
lin—” 

He said good night to her a little later, 
and went and smoked in the restaurant car. 

The game was now in his own hands, and 
169 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

he felt no compunction, but an unusual ten- 
derness was in his heart. She was so 
young, so little, so — innocent. And it will 
surprise no one who knows anything of men, 
that the very innocence he was destroying 
was to him Lily’s greatest charm ! 

It was after twelve o’clock, and Lily hav- 
ing knelt and said her prayers exactly as 
usual, lay in her bed in the moonlight, her 
long pigtails spread evenly along the red 
blankets. Her eyes were shut, but she was 
not asleep. Could she ever sleep again, she 
wondered. 

The Prince loved her and she loved him. 
Oh, yes, it surely must be love, although it 
was not in the least like the untempestuous 
sentiment she had felt for the excellent Sam- 
uel. 

It was certainly a great pity that the 
Prince had a wife, otherwise he would, of 
course, marry her (although, as she had 
said, she did not particularly wish to be his 
wife, or anyone’s again). It would have 
been very simple. 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

As it was — 

A phrase of Sister Smith’s uttered in one 
of their talks before Drummond’s ukase had 
gone forth, in some narrative of her early 
days, came into her mind. 

“It was a pity ’e was married, dear, but 
there, it wasn’t *is fault, poor darling, seeing 
as ’e’d married before ’e’d ever set eyes on 
me!” 

At the time, this remark vaguely under- 
stood by Sister Drummond to be of the na- 
ture of an excuse, had carried little compre- 
hension with it. But Lily Drummond, be- 
loved of a beautiful Prince, understood it. 

She was restless and tried prayer, a simple 
narcotic whose efficacy she had often experi- 
enced though never before consciously sum- 
moned. It failed. 

Then, as she had safely seen the eighteenth 
sheep lumber over a fence, the dressing-room 
door opened, and Troumetskoi came in. 

“Don’t be frightened,” he said hastily; “I 
only want to say good night to you, my little 
love.” 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

He sat down on the edge of the bed, and 
put his arms round her. “Lily, if you tell me 
to go, on my honour as an officer and a gen- 
tleman, I will do so. But — I will never 
come back. First kiss me, and then tell me. 
I will keep my word.” 

She did not answer. Bending slowly, he 
kissed her. When he raised his head from 
hers, she lay quite still, her eyes shut, her 
face as white as her pillow. 

“Lily— shall I go?” 

There was a long pause, and then she an- 
swered faintly, but with a new, firm note in 
her voice : 

“No, stay.” 


1 72 


XXI 


Mrs. Drummond maintained her unexpect- 
edness, to Troumetskoi’s great joy, in her 
way, the next morning, of accepting her new 
position. 

He had felt, on awakening, a pang of fear 
that the missionary spirit in her might pos- 
sibly make itself evident, and he hated 
scenes as mad dogs hate water. If she had 
wept, he would have dried her pretty eyes, 
for in his way he loved her, but drying eyes, 
however pretty, was not in his line, and in 
his admirable simplicity he knew it. 

But Lily’s eyes were dreamy, not wet, 
when he went into her compartment after 
breakfast, and she let him kiss her as if he 
had been kissing her for years. 

“You darling,” he said. 

She smiled at him. “I suppose I am what 
173 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

good people call a bad woman, now,” she 
observed serenely. 

“You are what / call the greatest angel 
on earth,” he returned, full of gratitude as 
well as love. She looked exquisitely pretty, 
and a little air of proprietorship towards 
himself, an air more common to n^wly en- 
gaged girls than to women in her position, 
positively enraptured him. 

“I have been thinking,” she went on per- 
fectly unembarrassed, “how awful it would 
have been if we had met — well — before.” 

“Before what, my little dear?” 

For a minute she hesitated, but only be- 
cause she was struggling to find exactly the 
right words. 

“Suppose,” she said at last slowly, “I had 
met you while — while I was married, I mean 
before I was a widow — it would have been 
awful, wouldn’t it?” 

“Frightful,” he agreed gravely. 

“Then — I am so glad I didn’t meet you 
until after poor Samuel was taken. The 
Bible says the righteous are very happy in 
174 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

heaven. Samuel was very good, very good 
indeed, so it stands to reason, I think, that 
he cannot look down and see what is happen- 
ing. Don’t you think so?” 

He showed every tooth in his head, in his 
amused laughter. 

“Oh, priceless woman, what have I done to 
deserve you ? Of course I think so, but you 
do love me?” 

Her eyes darkened. “I love you,” she an- 
swered, leaning her cheek against his shoul- 
der, “you know I do. I never knew I could 
love anyone so much. Isn’t it wonderful?” 

It was wonderful, even to him, and the 
wonder endured, for she was that rarest of 
things human, a perfect mistress. Good 
wives are frequently to be met with, in spite 
of what pessimists write and say to the con- 
trary, for a wife has in common with her 
husband, many interests besides those of 
love, but a good mistress is as rare as a good 
emerald. * 

And Lily was in her way perfection. She 
was not so much in love as Troumetskoi was, 
175 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

which, of course, was to her advantage, but 
she loved for the first time, and with the 
ardour of her Latin blood. At the same time 
she was gentle, amusing and absolutely un- 
exacting, although she had been so rebellious 
in her own mind before she had come to this 
understanding. Now she knew that her 
Prince loved her, and the kind and the meas- 
ure of his love satisfied her completely. 

He gave her the emerald necklet, and she 
wore it night and day, loving its barbaric 
splendour with the passionate enthusiasm of 
a child. 

The long train moved comfortably over 
the plains, across the great river, past nu- 
merous cities whose names ended for the 
most part in “sk,” the weather was fine, the 
world seemed full of joy. 

Then one evening — Moscow. Marvel- 
lous city of green roofs and gilded turrets — 
city of jewelled churches, of ancient and ro- 
mantic palaces, of excellent restaurants, of 
portly, padded cab-drivers, of wayside 
shrines. 


176 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

The hotel, its restaurant perfectly respect- 
able by day, as completely the contrary by 
night, was a revelation to Lily Drummond, 
whose rapid development of epicurean tastes 
amused, as well as delighted, her lover. He 
took great pains to arrange for her meals 
that would please her, and her childlike 
greed was delicious to behold. 

They went to The Hermitage and ate 
caviar, and drank with it a gorgeous fiery 
liqueur that lived in queer long-necked bot- 
tles; they sampled the Slavinsky Bazaar, 
where the fish one eats are caught 
before one’s eyes in the huge tank in the 
middle of the room. And they bought 
furs. 

“Mr. and Mrs. Troumetskoi” spent many 
thousand roubles in the big fur shops, and 
Lily’s quality of childlike greed proved to 
apply not only to food and drink, but to all 
the good things of life as well. 

Wrapped to her eyes in sables, she was so 
different a woman from the little missionary 
of a month before, that the good Samuel, 
1 77 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

if he was looking down, probably did not rec- 
ognise her at all. 

Troumetskoi was enchanted. He was too 
rich to have to count the money he spent, 
and he was really very much in love. Also, 
greedy of pretty things though Lily was, she 
had no ugly love of valuable things. She 
knew nothing of money, never having had 
any, and he took good care not to let her 
know what his presents cost. 

After a week in Moscow they went on to 
Berlin. 

“A horrible city,” Lily declared, “all but 
the statues.” By the statues she meant 
those in the Sieges-Allee ! 

Then they hurried on to Paris, and their 
honeymoon was at an end. For at the 
Hotel Chatham was installed, waiting for 
her husband, Princess Katia Troumetskoi. 

“Ah, my Lily,” he cried, as he left Mrs. 
Drummond in her gorgeously ornate apart- 
ment in a large hotel in the Champs Elysees, 
“how I hate to leave thee !” 

i 7 8 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

“Yes, mon cheri,” she returned, “I hate it 
too. But you will come to-morrow.” 

Her unfailing philosophy rather hurt him 
at that moment, but he too was a philoso- 
pher, and soon recovered his content in her 
wisdom. Anything was better than tears 
and clinging arms. 

He came the next day, and the next, and 
every day. It amused him immensely to 
watch the unfailing coming true of all his 
prophecies. 

Lily loved her bath, her chocolate, her 
finery, as much as he had predicted. The 
first time he took her to a big dressmaker’s 
in the rue de la Paix, her self-confidence took 
him quite by surprise. 

She had not lost her gentle manner or her 
soft voice; she had none of the queenly 
hauteur of most ladies of the half world, but 
what she said was listened to by the elegant 
vendeuse with more than the usual perfunc- 
tory respect. The one model was too gay — 
the next “of too heavy material for such a 
179 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

little woman” — the orange trimming on the 
third was very ugly indeed. Quite sure of 
herself, the ex-mission lady sat there, refus- 
ing to take what she did not like, and ex- 
traordinarily sure of what she did like. 

She was moderate in her wishes, sincerely 
opposed to extravagance, possessed, in a 
word, of instinctive good taste. 

Troumetskoi, who had come if not to 
scoff, at least to be amused, remained to ad- 
mire. 

“You are a marvel,” he said in English 
in the lift. 

A quick frown drew her delicate brows to- 
gether. “Do not speak English to me,” she 
said. 

And he did not ask why. 


180 


XXII 


One day in the following May, Troumetskoi 
• drove up in his motor to a small white stone 
hotel near the Bois, and, ringing, stood 
whistling softly in the sun till the door 
should be opened. 

When, after a short pause, it did open, the 
solemn English butler informed him that 
Madame de Faid’herbe was not at home. 

“She ’as gone for a walk, my lord, in the 
Bois, but breakfast is ordered for ’alf-past- 
twelve.” 

“Very good, Squirrell, I’ll come in and 
wait.” 

Squirrell, who of course understood per- 
fectly well what was the status of the lady 
he served, but whose ambition in life was to 
pretend that he did not know, drew back re- 
spectfully, and Troumetskoi went into the 
drawing-room. The house had cost him a 
181 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

pretty penny, as the saying goes, but it was 
a particularly charming house, and he had 
never regretted the price, especially as he 
knew that Lily had not the remotest idea of 
its value. 

There was a tiny garden in front of it, now 
ablaze with flowers; and at the back of the 
silver-coloured drawing-room was a large 
bay-window filled with rare and exquisite 
orchids. There was in the room a faint 
scent of lilac, of which essentially Parisian 
bloom great branches stood about in tall 
jars. 

“By jove, it is as characteristic a room as 
I ever saw,” reflected Troumetskoi, sitting 
down and looking round him. “Extraordi- 
nary where she gets her taste !” 

He had filled a low bookcase with deli- 
cately bound books. Lily never read a word, 
he knew, nor did she make the usual pre- 
tence of doing so; but the books were orna- 
mental. On a table stood a photograph of 
himself, unframed. He liked its frameless 
condition, as unofficial. 

182 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

Presently he rang and asked Squirrell to 
bring him a glass of iced Apollinaris. 

A purple enamel clock on the mantelpiece 
struck half-past twelve as he set the empty 
glass down on the salver, and at the same 
moment he heard through the open windows 
over which the silken blinds were discreetly 
drawn, the delicious little crash of Lily’s 
laughter. 

He smiled unconsciously. He remem- 
bered, as poor, translated Samuel had done, 
the first occasion on which he had heard it 
in the train, when its remarkable musical 
quality had caused him one of the keenest 
pleasures he had ever experienced. 

And this pleasure had never lessened. 
Every time she laughed in that way of unre- 
strained delight his pleasure was as great. 
It was the most beautiful laugh he had ever 
heard in his life. 

But at what could she be laughing now, 
in the street? She, usually so dignified, so 
quiet. 

He went to a window and, drawing up the 

183 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

blind, but himself remaining hidden by the 
delicate lace curtains that emerged from the 
drawn-back grey satin ones, looked out. 

The gate was just closing on Lily, who still 
laughed, and on three of the most extraordi- 
nary figures surely, that ever were seen on 
the threshold of the house of a woman in 
her position. 

“’Ere we are,” Lily said, waving her hand; 
“this is my house, and breakfast will be 
ready. I hope you are hungry.” 

“We ’ad breakfast at seven,” answered 
one of the party, wonderingly. 

Lily’s rose-coloured sunshade slipped 
softly down its ivory stick. 

“Of course, of course,” she said, “I mean 
luncheon. We call it breakfast here in 
France.” 

She wore white from head to foot, and, 
compared to her hideously clad guests, 
looked a slim and flawless lily indeed. 

As they came into the blue-tiled hall, 
Troumetskoi, very puzzled, met them. 

Lily started and a bright blush swept up 
184 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

' over her face. Obviously she had forgotten 
him. 

“Bon jour, Madame,” he said, ceremoni- 
ously, bowing low over her hand, adding 
quickly, “Who on earth are your friends?” 

To the surprise of everybody she again 
burst out into her exquisite laughter, and sit- 
ting down on an ancient Venetian wed- 
ding-chest, gave full play to her enjoy- 
ment. 

Then, at last, wiping her eyes, she said, 
turning to the three strangers, “I do beg 
your pardon, — I had invited Monsieur — 
Monsieur Ours to breakfast, and then for- 
gotten all about him!” 

The strangers, a bearded man, a woman 
and a lank hobbledihoy youth stared at each 
other, and the youth giggled stupidly. 

For a moment Troumetskoi was inclined 
to be angry, for he had not felt like a bear, 
and a bear she called him. 

“Monsieur Ours,” he said stiffly, in Eng- 
lish, “regrets that his presence is inoppor- 
tune, and will not detain you any longer.” 

185 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

But she jumped down and caught his arm. 
“Voyons, Serge,” she pleaded, “pardonne- 
moi. It is,” she added hastily in French, 
“some of my old friends from the Mission, 
and of course I invited them to breakfast. 
Do not be cross, dear.” 

Then he was presented to Sister Bland, 
Brother Bland and Master Sydney Bland, 
who bowed their very best bows and treated 
him to hasty contact with their moist warm 
hands. 

They were not attractive physically — the 
Blands. Brother Bland’s large and un- 
kempt beard did not hide so completely as he 
believed, his cravatless condition, and the 
only comparative freshness of his collar. 

His black clothes were worn shiny, and 
now, as well, powdered with the dust that 
lay in the wrinkles of his unblacked boots. 

Sister Bland looked but little better, for 
the beaded mantle she wore had lost most of 
its beads, and her bonnet, decorated with 
black poppies and a tuft of green grass, was 
as shabby. Sister Bland’s nose was long 
1 86 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

and crooked, and her teeth were mostly 
things of the past. 

Master Sydney, the erstwhile little boy 
who had wept on the pier that day long ago 
when he and his sister were embarking for 
England, was ungainly, and strangely mot- 
tled as to complexion. In fact, the less said 
about his complexion the better. He had 
also a startlingly deep and untrammelled 
voice. 

Monsieur Ours did not look forward to the 
breakfast he had expected to partake of 
tete-a-tete with his hostess, and as the party 
settled itself at the table, it is to be feared 
his thoughts were not as holy as the pres- 
ence of that little band might have de- 
manded. 

And yet, in ten minutes’ time, Monsieur 
Ours — Mr. Oors, as the Blands called him — 
was doing the very utmost in his power to 
please and gratify the missionaries. Lily’s 
delight at seeing them was so real, her hos- 
pitality so alert, her eagerness for news of 
the Mission so evidently unfeigned, that a 

18Z 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

new element crept into his feelings for her. 
What a dear she was ! 

“And so you have been here for three 
whole days,” she was saying, “and I never 
knew! Oh, Sister Bland!” 

Sister Bland took a second helping of jel- 
lied eggs, scraping busily at the truffles, 
which she appreciated. 

“But we didn’t even know you lived in 
Paris, dear Sister Drummond,” she de- 
clared. 

Troumetskoi, whose eyes at that moment 
fell on Squirrell, half rose from the table. 
Was Squirrell going to faint? But the man 
recovered himself, and no one but Troumet- 
skoi had observed the sudden way in which 
he had set down the silver dish he was hold- 
ing. 

“We sail on Friday, as I was telling you,” 
pursued Sister Bland, “and glad we shall be 
to get back to the dear Mission. There’s no 
place like ’ome, Mr. Oors.” 

“Exactly,” assented the Russian courte- 
ously. 


1 88 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

“And Syd’s going out to take a look to 
see if he’d like to become a labourer in the 
Lord’s Vineyard. Aren’t you, Syd?” 

Syd, scarlet in the face from Chablis and 
embarrassment, assented, and his father 
caught sight of his glass. 

“Shame on you, Sydney Bland ! Put that 
glass away from you. Do you want to per- 
ish in eternal flames?” 

“Sister Drummond ain’t a-goin’ to perish 
in eternal flames, is she?” growled the boy, 
and Squirrell left the room in precipitation. 

“The brethren and sisters will be glad to 
hear you’re so comfortably fixed,” remarked 
Sister Bland, as they at length rose from the 
table and went into the next room for their 
coffee. “I suppose they’ll be as surprised as 
we were, to see you so prosperous. Your 
grandmother is dead, you said?” 

“Yes, she died just after you left the Mis- 
sion.” 

“Left a goodish deal, didn’t she?” pursued 
Brother Bland, kindly-curious. 

Troumetskoi listened, as curious, in an- 
"189 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

other way. What would Lily answer ? She 
was a bad liar, he knew. 

She sipped her creme-de-menthe. “She 
left me,” she answered without haste, 
“everything she had in the world.” And 
this, Troumetskoi knew to be the absolute 
truth. 

At half-past-two the Blands took their 
leave, making an appointment with Lily for 
the following morning. When they had 
gone, he kissed her gently. 

“You are a dear little thing,” he said. 
a And what are you going to do to-morrow ?” 

She looked at him, clear-eyed, like a child. 

“I am going,” she returned, “to buy pres- 
ents for everyone at the Mission, so please 
give me a lot of money.” 


190 


XXIII 


Eugene Squirrell, who had been born and 
brought up in the groves of Tooting, de- 
bated for some time in his own mind as to 
whether this new revelation might constrain 
him to leave Madame de Faid’herbe’s serv- 
ice. 

His deliberations left such visible signs on 
his countenance that Lily asked him kindly if 
he was ill. 

“No, Madame; thank you; I am quite 
well.” 

“But, — you don’t look quite yourself these 
last few days, Squirrell,” she persisted. 

“I’m perfectly well, Madame; thank 
you — ” 

“Then perhaps you have had bad news?” 
she asked, looking up at him in such solici- 
tude that his reserve broke down. 

191 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

“I beg pardon, Madame,” he burst out; 
“it 6 s this : ever since I was a little nipper so 
’igh, I’ve given five shillings every Christ- 
mas to the Bledsoe Mission. My father was 
old Mr. Bledsoe’s coachman, so we was 
brought up in the Mission, in a manner of 
speaking. And — well — when I ’eard those 
people talking about it the other day at 
dejoonay, it came ’ome to me that — that 
per’aps I ought to leave.” 

But she did not even hear the outcome of 
his speech. 

“Your father old Mr. Bledsoe’s coachman, 
Squirrell? What an extraordinary thing! 
Really most curious. I lived at the Mission 
for eleven years — from the time I was mar- 
ried — ” 

Squirrell nodded gloomily. It was one 
thing to serve a lady who was what he 
privately called a wrong ’un, but quite an- 
other to serve a renegade from that sacred 
band to which he had sent nearer forty than 
thirty, five-bob pieces! 

“I know, Madame,” he answered, taking 
192 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

up the tray with the coffee things on it and 
regarding it gloomily. 

“I used to teach in the school, and sew for 
the poor heathen,” she went on, much as if 
she were referring, so detached was her 
manner, to a former existence, say in Mars. 
“Eleven years. I should never have left,” 
she added thoughtfully, “if my husband had 
not died.” 

“Your husband died, Madame!” 

She looked up, and beheld hope beaming 
at her from Squirrell’s red face. 

“Yes, Mr. Drummond died, of course — 
Oh, you may go now, Squirrell,” she added, 
suddenly realising the difference in their po- 
sitions, and feeling rather ashamed of her- 
self. 

Squirrell left the room, but he did not leave 
her service. The fact of Drummond’s be- 
ing dead made all the difference. 

“She couldn’t stay on there alone, I sup- 
pose,” he told himself, “and that’s ’ow it all 
’appened. I’ll send ten bob this Christmas. 


193 


XXIV 


That summer Lily went to Ostend, which 
of course delighted her to the depths of her 
being. Business forcing Troumetskoi to go 
to Russia for a few weeks, he found a chap- 
eron for the Ostend visit, — a “belle mar- 
quise” type of old woman, whose stormy 
past had left on her face an expression of 
the utmost sweetness and light. 

Lily at once became very fond of Madame 
d’Avricourt, and Troumetskoi departed 
with a feeling of comparative safety. He 
was sincerely fond of his mistress, and hated 
to leave her. And being fond of her, he 
was of course very jealous. 

“You will be a good girl?” he said with a 
smile, but his eyes grave; “you will not 
flirt?” 

Lily laughed. “Me flirt? But I Haven’t 
194 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

the remotest idea how to,” she answered; 
and he knew that she spoke the truth. 

“But — you won’t forget me?” 

This hurt her feelings. How could she 
be so ungrateful as to forget him, her dear 
Serge, who was so good to her ? 

He had to comfort her for his unnatural 
suspicion. When he came back from Rus- 
sia, he at once went to Ostend and found the 
two ladies thoroughly enjoying themselves. 
Their salon had, of course, a balcony over- 
looking the sea, and even Lily’s maid, 
Babette, was satisfied with the Hotel Splen- 
dide. 

“Are there many people here whom you 
know ?” he asked almost at once. She 
shook her head. 

“No. Monsieur d’Herblay is here; we 
dined with him last night; and the little 
Vicomte de Foljambe. He has his big 
motor, and we went to Bruges last 
week.” 

She looked very well and, he thought, 
prettier than ever. 


195 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

“Has she been sage?” he asked Madame 
d’Avricourt. 

That dowager nodded with a peculiar 
smile. “It is an angel, cher Prince,” she 
said, “but a real angel of heaven. If pretty 
young wives were as faithful there would be 
no place in the world for us others 1” 

Troumetskoi, whose wife was at Vichy, 
thoroughly enjoyed his honeymoon. The 
only fly in his ointment was Jules d’Herblay, 
one of his greatest friends, whose friendli- 
ness and sociability were, now, in the first 
raptures of his reunion with Lily, rather a 
bore. D’Herblay was short and rather 
stout, but extremely smart and, in his own 
opinion, tres anglais . His admiration of 
Lily was undisguised, and he appeared to ex- 
pect Troumetskoi to enjoy it. 

“You are devilishly lucky,” he used to 
say, “devilish lucky!” 

Lily smiled placidly at his enthusiasm and 
once when Troumetskoi was scolding help- 
lessly about the fellow’s constant presence, 
she asked in perfect good faith : “Then why 
196 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

don’t you tell him to keep away from 
us?” 

Her indifference to the very English one 
was evident and unfeigned. 

At the big race-meeting la belle Madame 
de Faid’heVbe created a real furore. Her 
gown was of all gowns the most perfect, her 
style of beauty, in a place where that com- 
modity unadorned is at a very serious dis- 
count, pleased the connoisseurs the more in 
that their appreciation of it flattened their 
own vanity. She was not painted, her lips 
were innocent of the gory-looking pommade 
so popular among ladies of her standing ; her 
clear young eyes were guiltless of burnt 
cork, or whatever it is that these same ladies 
consider so irresistible ; she looked absolutely 
respectable, ma foi, yet, — behold, we admire 
her! 

A Russian Grand Duke was greatly taken 
with her, and asked her to dine; a very 
monied Hebrew nobleman from Cologne was 
heard to swear that he intended to “souffler” 
her from Troumetskoi; and Mesdemoiselles 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

Lucienne de Montmorency and Yvonne de 
Rohan, whose hatred of each other was no- 
torious, became almost friendly in their 
scornful depreciation of “la Beguine,” as the 
brilliant Yvonne named her. 

The name stuck to her and “La Beguine” 
she remained. Indeed, there was something 
nun-like about her serene little face; an 
aroma of the cloister seemed still to cling to 
her, in spite of her beautiful clothes. 

“She is diantrement the prettiest girl of 
the lot,” the Grand Duke cried to Troumet- 
skoi, “and if you ever find it necessary to 
part with her — ” 

Troumetskoi was deeply gratified by Lily’s 
success, but at the same time he was too fond 
of her to enjoy some aspects of her fame, 
and he was not sorry when she was again 
installed in her little hotel near the Bois. 

As for Lily, she was perfectly happy, 
which is in itself a remarkable and beautiful 
circumstance. 


198 


XXV 


It was in the following spring, just about a 
year after the visit of the Blands, that some- 
thing happened. 

Lily now owned, in addition to her house, 
her emeralds and various pretty rings and 
trinkets of value, a rope of very fine pearls, a 
large touring car, and furs worth, her maid 
knew, fabulous sums. She had also a great 
boar-hound of whom she was extremely 
fond. 

She was considered to have done remark- 
ably well, but this she did not know. 

One rainy May day, she was sitting in her 
boudoir looking at a large assortment of 
hats that had been sent from the Maison 
Sophie-Adelaide, when SquirrelFs subordi- 
nate, a young Frenchman, who had only that 
day been added to the establishment, ushered 
in a lady. 


199 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

Lily, who was in a loose blue neglige with 
a gold girdle, turned in surprise, a huge 
black hat on her head. She had never be- 
fore seen the lady. 

“Bon jour, Madame,” she said politely* 
removing her hat and balancing it on the 
top of a huge pile of open boxes. 

“I am Madame de Faid’herbe; you wish to 
see me?” 

The lady, who plainly did not belong to 
Lily’s world, flushed; she was embarrassed. 

“Yes, Madame. I — I fear I am intrud- 
ing, but,—” 

But Lily was very hospitable and, apolo- 
gising for her servant’s blunder in bringing 
the stranger hither instead of to the draw- 
ing-room, led the way to that charming 
apartment and begged her caller to sit down. 

“I am,” the caller said abruptly, when she 
had done so, “the Princess Troumetskoi.” 

“Oh!” said Lily. 

“Yes, and I — I know everything.” 

“Then — there seems no more to be said.” 

The two women eyed each other for a few 
200 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

seconds. We know what the Russian saw. 
Lily saw a dark, rather flat face with remark- 
ably bright black eyes, and lips the redness 
of which was obviously not altogether due 
to nature. 

The Princess was about thirty-five, looked 
healthy, and was expensively, if not well, 
dressed. 

“There is more to be said,” she returned 
at length, and Lily bowed. 

“I listen, Madame.” 

“For a long time I have known that — 
that there was someone. And yesterday I 
— I made sure.” 

“How?” 

“I saw him come here.” 

“H’m!” observed the culprit; “you fol- 
lowed him; that was not nice of you.” 

“Nice ! And you dare to say that to me ?” 

Lily laughed, not at all brazenly, nor even 
unkindly. 

“Of course I dare. I am in my own 
house.” 

“The house that he — my husband — gave 
201 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

you. It is — ” All the Orgoblenskys are 
short in temper. 

Lily did not speak for several seconds. 
Then she said civilly : “It is true. He gave 
me the house, the motor, these” touching 
the pearls, “everything. He is very kind to 
me.” 

The Princess gasped. “And you are not 
ashamed to say that to me !” She was really 
amazed, and Lily saw it. 

“No ; I am not ashamed. He is very fond 
of me, — he likes to give me things.” 

“ Things’ such as eighty thousand francs’ 
worth of pearls !” 

Lily half rose. “Eighty thousand — what 
did you say?” 

“Bah ! don’t try to fool me ! I said eighty 
thousand francs’ worth of pearls, and you 
know perfectly well that that rope is worth 
at the very least that much. More likely a 
hundred thousand.” 

“Mon Dieu!” Lily stared at the pearls 
she had caught into her hands. “Can it be 
possible ?” Slowly she took them off. “You 
20 2 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

may have them,” she added, simply. “I 
hadn’t an idea they were worth so much.” 

But the Princess drew back angrily. 
“Absurd! I don’t want your pearls. 
Prince Troumetskoi is quite able to indulge 
in the freak of giving pearls to cocottes if he 
likes !” 

“I am not a cocotte,” returned Lily, unre- 
sentfully. 

The Princess sniffed. “Indeed ! Then 
what are you ?” 

Lily hesitated and then said in her gentlest 
voice: “Oh, well, that doesn’t matter, does 
it? Go on.” 

The Princess was silent. “If you have 
nothing more to say,” resumed Lily, “why 
did you come ?” 

The rain had ceased, and a sudden gush 
of pale sunlight flooded her little figure as 
she spoke. “Why did you come?” 

Poor Katia Troumetskoi! Why had she 
taken such a mad, undignified step? She 
asked herself with even greater wonder than 
Lily had asked her. 


203 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 


“I — I really don’t know,” she muttered at 
last; “I am ashamed of myself, — I was a 
fool.” 

Lily gazed at her. “Don’t be ashamed,” 
she said gently. “You aren’t a fool at all, I 
can see that. And I didn’t mean to offend 
you about the pearls. And I really didn’t 
know how much they were worth.” 

The Princess gazed back. “Upon my 
faith, I believe you !” 

Lily nodded, satisfied but without surprise. 
“Yes; it’s quite true. You see, before — be- 
fore I met him , I had never seen such things 
in my life. I was a missionary, you know.” 

“A missionary !” 

“Yes, in China. That’s why I didn’t 
know. About the pearls, I mean. Well — ” 

The Princess was still staring. “It is 
quite different from what I expected,” she 
murmured, rising. “I’ll go now.” 

But Lily was thinking. “I wouldn’t have 
come myself,” she observed candidly, “but 
now that you are here — you don’t mind the 
204 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

pearls, so you don’t mind the motor, I sup- 
pose. Well — what is it you do mind?” 

She was so pretty, so young, so nice , that 
the elder woman suddenly forgot who she 
was, and broke down. 

“Mind? But I mind everything! He is 
my husband, and — and — ” 

Lily’s delicate little eyebrows rose sud- 
denly to the roots of her hair. “Oh! you 
mean that you love him ?” 

The Princess — remember that she is an 
Orgoblensky — burst into uncontrollable 
tears. 

“Yes, I do, I do love him,” she cried 
wildly. “Of course I love him, and you 
have no right — ” 

But Lily interrupted her, laying one hand 
on her arm. “Don’t cry,” she said gently; 
“it’s quite all right. I didn’t know . That’s 
all; I didn’t know. Now, please don’t cry, 
Princess. Let me think for a moment.” 
She went to the window and stood for sev- 
eral minutes looking out at the little rain- 
205 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

swept garden. Then she came back and 
stood with folded hands before the other 
woman. “Please don’t cry,” she repeated, 
compassionately. “It will be quite all right. 
You may have him.” 

Nothing is more momentarily disconcert- 
ing than an unexpected victory. Katia 
Troumetskoi raised her wet face from her 
hands and, still sobbing, stared. 

“Yes, you may have him.” 

“Serge? You really mean that you will 
give him up ?” 

“Yes,” returned the ex-missionary to the 
heathen, “I will give him up. I am very 
fond of him, but — I can do quite well with- 
out him, and you, I perceive, cannot. Be- 
sides,” she added serenely, taking her call- 
er’s elusive handkerchief from a gold bag 
that the Princess could not open, and giving 
it to her as to a child, “he’s the only one you 
can have, and I can have all I want.” 

The Princess gasped. “All? — all what?” 

“Men.” 

“But—” 


206 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

“Never mind; it is all quite right, I assure 
you. He’s coming to dine to-night and I’ll 
tell him. He has,” she added, with a little 
sigh of regret, “been very good to me.” 


207 


XXVI 


True to her promise given at the very end 
of the famous interview, Lily never told 
Troumetskoi of his wife’s coming, nor what 
her reason was for leaving him. 

“It is enough,” she insisted gently, as he 
raged up and down the drawing-room. “Je- 
n’en veux plus !” 

“But have I displeased you? Oh, Lily, 
you are being very unkind,” the big man 
groaned. He was really quite cut up, al- 
though the warmth of his feelings had been 
for some months rather cooling. 

“You have been kindness and goodness it- 
self,” she said, “and I shall never forget you, 
Serge.” 

“Then why?” 

“That I will not tell you — no, not if you 
break everything in the room. Voyons, 
Serge, let us part kindly I” 

208 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

He came and stood before her, his hand- 
some face sullen and red. “You no longer 
love me,” he declared. 

She looked gravely at him, her small face 
very sweet, as she reflected. “ ‘Tout passe/ 
you have often told me. Perhaps it is that 
I do not. Perhaps my love was never very 
great.” 

And then, of course, he asked her with a 
great display of sudden, sardonic indiffer- 
ence: “Who is my successor to be, may I 
ask?” 

After a short pause, during which she 
was again, it was plain, reflecting conscien- 
tiously, she gave him his answer. 

“I am not sure, Serge, — but it might be 
M. d’Herblay. He is very kind, and he 
seems to like me — ” 

At this he gave a great roar of angry 
laughter, which ended less bitterly than it 
began. 

“Mes compliments! Le brave Jules. I 
suppose it is his figure that has captivated 
you ?” 


209 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

“He has not captivated me at all, Serge. 
I like you far better, only — I have decided 
to leave you, and I must live somehow, 
mustn’t I ? Oh, don’t be cross, Serge, dear,” 
she went on gently, joining her delicate 
hands and looking at him in a way that ar- 
rested his attention. “Indeed, I am only 
doing what I think right.” 

“Oh, it’s your duty, you mean, to chuck 
me and — and take another lover,” he 
sneered. 

“Yes; I mean to say, — I cannot explain, 
but I am going to do it, — leave you, I mean. 
And,” she went on thoughtfully, “it would 
be easier to go to M. d’Herblay than to 
some stranger.” 

Something in her manner impressed him. 
He sat down, drawing a deep breath, and 
lit a fresh cigarette. He was not, he knew, 
broken-hearted. He had really loved her — 
he loved her still, and he had for her, more- 
over, the affection a man always has for a 
woman to make whom happy he has taken 
pains. But — caprice was part of the game 
210 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

and the man who resists a woman's caprice 
is a fool. 

“It is just that, then?" he asked, after a 
pause. “Just that you wish to leave me, 
that you think it time to make a change?" 

“Yes, Serge." 

He hesitated. D'Herblay was not so rich 
as he, nor was he so generous. To most 
women in Lily's position, Troumetskoi would 
have mentioned these facts; but to Lily he 
could not. 

Lily sat watching him, her small face 
rather wistful. He had been very good to 
her and she was fond of him. But she had, 
like most people, her own ideas of fair play, 
and the idea of temporising with her prom- 
ise to the Princess did not even occur to 
her. 

“You are not angry?" she asked pres- 
ently. 

He rose and came to her, laying one great 
hand on her shoulder. 

“Angry? No, my dear, I am sorry; for 
I am very fond of you still, but — I know 
2X1 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

the rules of the game. We must remain 
friends, Lily.” 

She rose, and raised her face for his kiss, 
which was indeed a very kind one. “Thank 
you, Serge,” she answered gratefully, “tu 
es gentil tout plein!” 

The clock struck and he waited until it 
had ceased. Then he went on: “And, Lily, 
the lease of this house does not run out till 
December. The stuff in it is all yours, you 
know — ” 

She looked seriously at him. 

“Yes?” 

Suddenly he was embarrassed, as if he 
had been trying to give things to a lady of 
his own social position. 

“The devil,” he said, impatiently, looking 
at the ceiling; “I mean to say, in two words, 
you are not poor now ; I should like to have 
you go on having the — the usual money — 
so that you need — be in no hurry — in no 
hurry to — ” 

His embarrassment was absurd and an- 
noyed him; but Lily was quite calm. 

212 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

“I see what you mean/' she answered, 
patting his hand in a little comforting way; 
“and it is very kind of you — you are always 
very kind. But I shall not stay on here and 
I don't want any money, thanks." 

“But why? You have none of your own 
and I hate to think of you — " 

Again she patted his hand. “Don’t 
worry," she said; “I shall be all right. I 
will stay here until I have made other ar- 
rangements and then, of course, I shall go 
away." 

“But—" 

“Please don't argue, Serge. You know 
how tired it always makes me. Indeed, I 
appreciate your goodness ; but I really 
couldn't take any more money from you. 
It — it wouldn’t be right." 


213 


XXVII 


The next morning Troumetskoi returned to 
the little hotel near the Bois, and rang. 

Squirrell, who opened the door, was un- 
mistakably agitated. 

“Oh, my lord,” the man began at once, 
“she ’as gone away.” 

“Gone away!” 

“Yes, my lord. A telegram came this 
morning and Babette began packing at once. 
But she didn’t take Babette, Sir, and she 
didn’t say where she was going. Babette 
thinks something has happened, Sir.” 

Troumetskoi stood quite still in the de- 
lightful May sunshine. The lilacs were 
blossoming bravely, their scent was mingled 
with one of tar ; the street was being mended 
at a short distance, and the two odours 
seemed to the Russian the very essence of 
Paris. 


214 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

He suddenly missed Lily intensely. It 
seemed very dreadful that she should be 
gone. And where had she gone ? Had she, 
after all, lied to him? Was there another 
man? He glared angrily at the afflicted 
Squirrell. 

“Did she leave no letter for me?” 

“Yes, Sir; there is a letter. I — I am 
sorry, my lord, but I — I really quite forgot 
it.” 

In the dainty grey drawing-room, with its 
scent of lilac and mignonette, and the quiet 
ticking of its purple clock, Troumetskoi read 
the letter. 

“Dear Serge,” it said, “I have gone to 
England in a great hurry. I have taken all 
the pretty things you gave me to wear, but 
I will not have the furniture. Please do not 
think me ungrateful. I shall never forget 
you. Do not be angry with me for leaving 
like this ; 'Good-byes’ are such useless 
things. I hope you will always be happy. 
God bless you. Lily.” 

Troumetskoi lunched alone that day, and 
215 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

most of the delicacies he ordered were taken 
away untouched. 

His anger, his misery, were, of course, 
absurd as well as illogical, but they were for 
the time very strong. And as he drank 
vodka, glaring moodily at the tablecloth, 
they grew stronger, until he felt himself a 
bitterly unhappy and infamously treated 
man. 

To whom had she gone? D’Herblay was, 
he knew, in Paris. Cherringham, a young 
Englishman he himself had introduced to 
her and whose admiration had been obvious, 
was laid up with rheumatic fever somewhere 
in Italy. Pryce — Barrington — no, he was 
too poor to suit Madame Lily. Where in 
Heaven’s name was she then? He knew 
everyone she knew in Paris, and not one of 
them of whom he could think was at that 
time out of Paris. 

Towards four o’clock he left the restau- 
rant, redder in the face than usual, and 
walked slowly towards his club. She was, 
without a doubt, like all the rest of them. 
216 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

In spite of her angelic little face, she had 
lied to him, fooled him. There was, of 
course, some other man — probably some 
vulgar beast of her own class. Perhaps a 
chauffeur, or a jockey like the man in that 
novel he had read the other day. 

She was just about arriving in London 
now, he reflected as he went up the steps of 
his club, and the fellow was no doubt meet- 
ing her. Faugh! 

All the worst in Troumetskoi’s nature was 
now uppermost and his imagination ran riot 
in his ridiculous — but none the less human — 
jealousy. 

The Princess did not see him until the 
next day, for the excellent reason that he 
did not go home until broad daylight. 


21 7 


XXVIII 


When the cab stopped in the chill rainy 
evening, the cabman climbed down and in- 
spected the name that was, in the wet, almost 
illegible, on the gate-post. 

“Right, Miss,” he declared after a pause. 
“ 'Ere we are.” 

Lily leaned out and looked about her. 
The narrow street, stretching between grimy 
yellow brick walls, did not tempt her. 

“Zion Villa, Miss,” urged the cabman, 
who although no longer young, and decid- 
edly bottle-nosed, had an eye for beauty; 
“Ell carry yer boxes in.” 

Lily got out and stood with her skirts 
gathered up, while the man, having rung, 
took her boxes from the top of the cab. 

In the light of the two street lamps visible, 
puddles, mud and smoke-blackened walls 
were all that was to be seen. And the rain z 
218 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

a heavy grey downpour, seemed singularly 
unlike the quick, silver showers of Paris. 

She paid the man and, as the door opened, 
stepped bravely into the sloppy, sparsely- 
gravelled path, whose straight line was 
faintly perceptible in the light from the open 
door at its far end. 

“Mrs. Drummond?" the invisible person 
under the umbrella asked her. 

“Yes. How — how is Mr. Drummond?" 

The invisible one closed the gate and bade 
the cabman mind the sides of the door 
and the corners of the stairs, and led the 
way to the house. 

“ 'Is body is as bad as can be," she an- 
swered slowly, “ but 'is soul is full of light." 

Lily gasped. It was at once so strange 
and so familiar. Samuel would have said 
it, or Mr. Brady, or Brother Blacker, or Sis- 
ter Penguin — any one of the missionaries, 
but it seemed years since she had heard such 
a phrase and her ears had grown strange 
to it. 

At the door a large old woman stood wait- 
219 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

in g for her, a square-built, thin old woman 
with a bunch of purple grapes in her black 
lace cap, an old woman whose face, stern yet 
emotionally distorted, above the cameo 
brooch with the weeping willow on her 
bosom, Lily had known for years in a por- 
trait. Samuel’s mother ! 

“I’m glad you’ve come,” Mrs. Drummond 
said, blowing her nose, which was red and 
shiny from much previous blowing. “ ’E 
would be pleased if ’e knew. Also my poor 
lost Samuel.” 

“Yes,” returned Lily vaguely, accepting a 
kiss that smelt of eucalyptus and peppermint 
and hot buttered toast; “of course I came. 
How is he?” 

“In God’s ’ands.” 

Mrs. Drummond led her guest into the 
room on the left of the passage and then, 
in the crude light of an unshaded petroleum 
lamp, looked silently at her. 

“You look older nor what I expected,” she 
declared, “and you aren’t so pretty as your 
pictures. Is that brooch a real topaz?” 

220 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

“It’s a yellow diamond,” Lily answered 
gently. 

Mrs. Drummond sat down suddenly. “A 
diamond! I knew your grandmother ’ad 
left you money — Sister Bland wrote to me — 
but diamonds! You will find us too plain 
for you, I fear,” she went on plaintively; 
“we ’aven’t any diamonds — although there 
are rich folk in the connexion, too. Will 
you ’ave some tea?” 

But Lily was too tired to eat and asked 
to go to her room. 

This apartment, up two flights of stairs, 
was very bare and much ingenuity seemed 
to have been employed in the choice of its 
furniture. It would have been hard to find 
a bed, a washing stand, a chest of drawers 
or a chair, uglier or more inconvenient than 
those destined to her use. 

“You’ll come down when you’re ready,” 
Mrs. Drummond said, as she left her; “I’ll be 
with Silsbee. ’E likes to ’ave me by ’im.” 

Lily tidied herself and then went down- 
stairs as she was bidden. It was curious 


221 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

how the old instinct of obedience had come 
back to her. 

Mrs. Drummond, who was again crying, 
took her at once to the sick room. Here, in 
an atmosphere thick and unpleasant, lay 
Samuel Drummond’s father, unconscious. 

“ ’E’s been like that ever since noon yes- 
terday,” the old woman whispered, “only ’e’s 
paler. His face was all purple at first. ’E 
was going downstairs after dinner and ’e 
called me. 'Flora,’ ’e said, 'come!’ I came 
running out from my room and just as I 
reached ’im ’e fell. ’E ’asn’t spoken since, 
but twice ’e’s looked at me.” 

“What does the doctor say?” returned 
Lily, taking the poor old womans arm 
kindly. “Sometimes they get well after the 
first stroke, you know.” 

“It’s in God’s ’ands. ’E knows what’s 
best. There ’ave been fifty-two callers since 
the news got about. Fifty-two. I could 
’ave ’ad ’elp from many ladies in the con- 
nexion,” she went on proudly, “but as 
Gladys is ill — that’s my nephew Paul’s wife 


222 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

— expecting ’er baby every minute — I 
thought I’d send for you. Samuel would 
’ave liked it.” 

“Oh, yes, of course,” Lily agreed. “I will 
do all I can to help you, Mrs. Drummond.” 

The servant who had opened the door 
came in at this point, every joint in the house, 
it seemed, creaking under her careful 
tread. 

“The doctor, mum,” she whispered, and 
disappeared. 

Lily followed her and sat in the drawing- 
room waiting until he should go. But he 
had caught sight of her, and being a man 
found it necessary to give her a resume of 
the stroke and its results. 

“Is he going to die?” she asked quietly, 
when he had ended his report. 

He shrugged his shoulders. “That is 
hard to tell. He is an old man, but he has 
been very healthy — he very probably may 
get over this attack.” 

Lily put one or two questions to him, so 
much to the point, so unlike the questions 
223 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

she looked as though she might ask, that 
he, in his turn, presented one to her. 

“I was correct in comprehending that you 
are poor Sam Drummond’s widow?” 

“Yes,” answered Lily composedly. 
“Why?” 

Dr. Hedges hesitated. “Oh, I don’t 
know,” he answered with some lameness ; “I 
only wondered.” 

He was about forty-five, and looked like 
Lord Haldane, a resemblance he carefully 
cultivated by means of pursing his clean- 
shaven lips and softly rubbing his hands. 

“Get Mrs. Drummond to go to bed, if you 
can,” he said, as he left; “she is worn out.” 

“Yes, I will make her sleep,” Lily’s an- 
swer, so confident yet so gentle, struck him. 

“I believe she will, too,” he told himself 
as he hurried home through the driving 
rain. “Looks as though she’d get her own 
way.” 


224 


XXIX 


The long days wore by, sinking into each 
other as drops of slow-flowing treacle sink, 
losing their identity, into the dull whole of 
their accumulation. 

The old man lay speechless in his bed ; the 
old woman sat by him, piteous in her grief, 
or interviewed callers downstairs and re- 
peated over and over again the story of the 
stroke and its results. 

“ 'Flora/ *e called,” Lily heard a dozen 
times as she passed the door, "and I came 
and found hm — ” 

The people of the connexion, it was plain, 
sincerely loved the gentle old man who for 
many years had periodically thundered 
threats of hell-fire at them. They mourned 
his illness, they sympathised with his poor 
old wife. 

Scraps of conversation about the Lord; 
225 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

about the wisdom of His acts; about Mr. 
Drummond's certainty of salvation, reached 
Lily from time to time, and she found her- 
self falling back into the once familiar 
phraseology as if she had never left it. 

“The dear Saviour is watching over him," 
she told Mrs. Drummond on one occasion; 
“he is one of His lambs, remember." Half- 
forgotten things about the old days in China 
came back to her mind; Samuel, of whom 
she had not thought for so long, became 
again a close, almost living, personality. 

“Samuel used to say," was often on her 
lips, or, “I’m sure Samuel would think — " 

Paris seemed like a dream. Sometimes 
she told herself that it, the house, Troumet- 
skoi, all were unreal, that she had been im- 
agining them. 

On her first Sunday in Clapham she went 
to chapel, and the hymns they sang were 
familiar to her, word for word. The very 
smell of the close little place carried her back 
to the Mission. The language she heard 
was the language of the Mission, the 
226 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

preacher who took Mr. Drummond’s place 
looked like Brother Smith, the little organ 
squealed and chuckled just as squealed and 
chuckled the one so many thousands of miles 
away. Lily had only to shut her eyes to 
see that other chapel. 

Often, too, she dreamed of Samuel, and 
her old feelings of admiring submission 
came back to her so strongly that she could 
not shake it off even when she awoke. 

She never once dreamt of Paris or of 
Troumetskoi. 

One day she found she had been a fort- 
night in Clapham, and she could not believe 
that the time was so short. Had she, she 
asked herself seriously, ever been anywhere 
else? Once she opened her jewel box and 
looked at the emeralds and the pearls to con- 
vince herself that it had not been all a dream. 

She was not bored ; she had no wish to go 
away; in tending the old man, who slowly 
grew better, and in caring for the old 
woman, she seemed to be perfectly in her 
proper place. When people stared at her in 
227 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

surprise, she wondered why. She had for- 
gotten that Paris clothes do not bear the 
stamp of Clapham. 

When six weeks had merged into the past 
and the old man was sitting in an armchair 
by the fire, able to say a few words which 
Lily understood better than anyone, some- 
thing happened. 

The sun was trying to shine and the sooty 
trees in the garden were at last really green. 
June had come; and the window was opened 
quite an inch from the top, “to give Silsbee 
some fresh air.” 

Mrs. Drummond had gone to see Gladys’ 
new baby — who had unexpectedly turned out 
to be twins — and Lily was sitting near the 
old man reading aloud to him. She was 
reading a sermon, a composition of much 
elegance of language, besprinkled thickly 
with the threats and curses so loved by the 
connexion. 

Hell-fire, brimstone, everlasting flames, 
the worm that gnaweth, the torment that 
dieth never, these brightened every page, 
228 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

and Mr. Drummond was thoroughly enjoy- 
ing himself. His violet, wrinkled lips moved 
slowly in tardy pursuit of the anathema so 
comforting to him ; his thin old hands stirred 
on the arms of the chair. 

There were pink-lined sea-shells on the 
chimney-piece, and a white marble clock with 
Mercury, balanced in outrageous defiance of 
the laws of gravitation, on the top of it. 
There were two large blue vases full of pam- 
pas grass. On the large mahogany table 
stood gilt-edged books, arranged in a wheel- 
like pattern ; there was a rug with a flaming- 
eyed poodle embroidered on it; the chairs 
were of green plush, the sofa was of horse 
hair. The wall paper was ochre and choco- 
late and of a dismal pattern. 

No room could have been in greater con- 
trast to that delicately beautiful one near the 
Bois in Paris, and yet Lily did not rebel 
at it. 

In fact, she thoroughly approved of the 
clock, and the rug reminded her of the long 
since dead Folichon. 


229 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

“Oh, my brethren,” she read, instinctively 
lowering her fresh soft voice to a profes- 
sional drone, “when the Last Day comes and 
we stand at the Judgment Seat, what will 
our feelings be ? When we gaze at the radi- 
ant throng in the pastures of Paradise, and 
then at the yawning abyss whence come the 
groans of the damned — ” 

At this delightful climax the door opened 
and two people, whom Lily had never seen 
before, came in ; a tall fair man with a grave 
face and gentle eyes, and a little child of 
six, a tiny black-haired thing dressed en- 
tirely, it seemed, in embroidery. 

“Well, father,” the man said, taking the 
old minister’s hand in his, “so here we are, 
at last. Cuckoo has been so impatient to see 
you. And how much better you look than I 
had dared ’ope.” 

Mr. Drummond nodded and tried to speak. 
The younger man listened eagerly, and then 
turned to Lily. 

“What is it?” he asked in a hasty under- 
tone. “I — I can’t understand.” 

230 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

“He says he is very glad to see you and 
that he is much better." 

“I am Herbert Walsh," the young man 
explained a minute later. “I married his 
daughter, you know." 

“Oh, yes. I am Mrs. Samuel." 

“You ! You poor Sam's widow ? How — 
strange." He had a pleasant voice, and 
something in his eyes was good to see. 

“Why is it strange?" Lily asked simply, 
but he could not explain and covered his 
confusion by taking the little girl's bonnet 
off and settling her in a chair near her grand- 
father. 

Lily had heard that Peggy, Samuel’s only 
sister, had married some years before, but 
she had not heard of her death until a few 
weeks ago. She knew that Walsh was a 
contractor and doing well and an ardent 
member of the connexion. And now she 
saw that he was a person to like and to trust. 

But this was all, whereas the six-year-old 
Cuckoo, a commonplace, round-eyed child, 
a mass of ugly cheap embroidery and 
231 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

oddly attached blue bows, gave her by some 
inexplicable freak of sympathy a queer thrill 
to her very heart. 

“Will you sit on my lap?” she said, tim- 
idly. 

Cuckoo, who was as thoroughly spoilt as 
only the motherless child of a lonely man 
can be, cocked her head on one side and an- 
swered in an odious tone of affected con- 
sideration, “Cuckoo will sit 9 ere 99 

Lily fetched chocolate from her room and 
Cuckoo partook of it in a way messy and 
lacking in charm that poor Lily, in her bad 
attack of love at first sight, thought ador- 
able. 

“She is too lovely,” she whispered to 
Walsh. 

And he, poor fellow, watching her clear- 
cut little face and dainty hands, mentally 
prostrated himself before her, never to rise 
again. 

“How old is she?” pursued Lily. 

“She’ll be seven in January.” 

“Her hair is too sweet 99 
232 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

“Pleased you like it. I do it up in rags 
at night" 

Presently the time for Mr. Drummond's 
arrowroot came, and Lily, tucking a napkin 
into his collarless shirt, fed him with a 
spoon. 

It was not a pretty task, for much of the 
nourishment went astray on the old man's 
garments, while he made strange, uncouth 
noises in his throat, but beautiful little Lily, 
bending over him, unconscious of the gra- 
ciousness of the picture she made, was very 
lovely, and Herbert Walsh knew it. 

“Cuckoo wants 'er tea," announced the 
child, and when the arrowroot was disposed 
of, Lily ministered to her wants. 

Cuckoo's head was badly shaped, her neck 
short, her eyes close together. Lambroso 
would have disapproved of her, but Lily 
loved her. 

“Will you give me a kiss?" she asked, 
when the visit was over and she had tied the 
child's appalling bonnet under its chin. 

Cuckoo graciously consented and then 
233 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

Walsh shook hands with his late wife's 
widowed sister-in-law. His hands were like 
ice, and his head seemed to swim, but Lily 
did not notice. 

“Good-bye, darling," she said, hugging 
the child again, “darling!" 

Then, when she could leave the old man, 
she went upstairs and sat in her room think- 
ing about the wonderful new feeling that 
had come to her. 


XXX 


A strange feeling of shyness prevented 
Lily making any enquiries as to the proba- 
bility of a speedy return of Walsh and his 
little daughter. She felt, without in the 
least knowing it, as a very young girl might 
feel about the man with whom she has fallen 
suddenly and bewilderingly in love ; she 
longed to ask and could not. When Mrs. 
Drummond the elder spoke casually of lit- 
tle Sarah, and it transpired that little Sarah 
was no other than Cuckoo, Lily blushed be- 
hind her teacup. 

For several days the young woman went 
her way as usual, mute on the subject next 
her heart, and then, just as she had made 
up her mind to ask when the child was likely 
to come again, the child canle. 

They were at dinner, the two women 
alone; the house reeked with the smell of the 
235 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

chops they were eating. Old Mrs. Drum- 
mond, who had another bad cold, contrib- 
uted to the animal odour a very strong one 
of eucalyptus and camphor. She also blew 
her nose constantly on a handkerchief bor- 
rowed from Silsbee — “ ’er own being so 
small." 

Lily took up the word “small," turned it 
over in her mind as a possible lead to the 
subject of Cuckoo, and was about to speak 
when the door opened and Herbert Walsh 
appeared, leading his daughter by the hand. 

“We’ve been to the dentist," he explained, 
his gentle face deepening in colour, “and as 
it’s raining, I thought you wouldn’t mind 
giving us a bit of dinner. ’Ow do you do, 
Mrs. Samuel?" 

Lily, blushing brightly, gave him her hand 
for a second and turned to Cuckoo, who was 
pale and red-eyed. Poor Walsh saw the 
blush and naturally took it unto himself. 

“Cuckoo, dear, let me take off your coat," 
Lily was saying; “poor little girl; did the 
dentist hurt her?" 


236 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

Cuckoo explained that she ’ated the den- 
tist, she did, and she wasn’t ever going to 
see ’im again, not if father gave ’er two six- 
pences. 

The cold chops were sent for, and pota- 
toes and cabbage, both boiled in that genial 
British sauce, water, returned from their 
retirement in the kitchen, and the guests 
partook of these delicacies. 

Walsh had on a satin tie of a warm purple 
hue, and his black clothes were evidently 
fresh from the hands of their creator. Lily, 
chancing to look at him, smiled in approval 
of his kind face. It was well that such as 
he should be the father of the seraphic 
Cuckoo, who at that moment was plunging 
her own fork into the saucer of strawberry 
jam produced by Lily to make the mutton 
go down better. 

Walsh returned the young woman’s 
glance with an arresting gaze of shy devo- 
tion. If Lily’s thoughts had been free she 
would have seen what he meant, but her 
brain was laden with thoughts of the child. 
237 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

Cuckoo to-day, because of the long sitting 
at the dentist's and doubtful weather, wore 
a red and blue checked frock, of hideous de- 
sign. Lily would give her a present of a 
pretty frock. Yes, and a hat. Perhaps 
Mr. Walsh would even allow her to take the 
child to a shop herself. 

These blissful meditations were inter- 
rupted by a summons from the drawing- 
room to the effect that the old gentleman 
“ 'ad swallowed 'is soup the wrong way and 
was choking somethink awful." 

The old lady and Lily followed the terri- 
fied servant and after a short interval were 
joined by Walsh and Cuckoo. 

“I thought perhaps you wouldn't mind 
keeping her, mother," he said diffidently, “as 
I have some business to see to. I can fetch 
her by six." 

Old Mrs. Drummond, who sat by the now 
quieted invalid holding his hand in hers, as- 
sented. 

Then Walsh shook hands and left the 

238 


room. 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

Lily, after a moment's hesitation, followed 
him and caught him just as he was leaving 
the house. 

“Oh, Mr. Walsh!" 

He turned, his tall, thin figure in its badly 
cut new clothes, boldly outlined against the 
pallid sunshine that was beginning to fill 
the dismal, smoke-blackened garden. Her 
hands clasped, she made her request, his eyes 
resting on her as if he had never before even 
heard of such a thing as a woman. 

“Take her to town and buy her a frock?" 
he repeated slowly. “Yes, I don't see why 
you shouldn't, although she has lots of 
clothes. I am not a poor man — " 

“I know, I know, but — it would make me 
so happy. Besides — " she added, delighted 
with her newly found argument, “you know 
I am her aunt." 

“Her aunt; h'm, yes. That's true. I 
suppose, Mrs. Samuel, that being the case, 
you couldn't make up your mind to call me — 
’Erbert?" 

Now Lily would have called him St. Paul, 
239 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

or King George if he had asked her. Was 
he not allowing her to spend money on the 
peerless Cuckoo? 

“Oh, yes,” she answered absently, “very 
glad to. And — oh, thank you so much.” 

“Pleasure’s mine,” he returned in sur- 
prised gratification. “I suppose, then, I may 
call you Lily, too?” 

“I meant thank you for letting me take 
Cuckoo out,” she returned, a little embar- 
rassed by his mistake. “Oh, yes, call me 
Lily if you like. May she have an ice — in- 
stead of tea, I mean?” 

He never forgot how she looked as she 
stood there so slim and flowerlike in her grey 
frock. There were pearls in her little pink 
ears, and green stones on her fingers. 

Giving his consent to Cuckoo’s consump- 
tion of an ice, he hesitated for a moment, 
and then dashed into the sunlight. He was 
afraid to stay another second. 


XXXI 


The summer passed swiftly for Lily Drum- 
mond as summers do to those enveloped in 
the glory of their first love. 

To her the ugly dull house in Clapham 
was as beautiful as any fairy palace; the 
abominable food provided by the one serv- 
ant was ambrosial in its character; to her, 
no weather could have been more ideal than 
the undecided characterless alternations of 
raininess and feeble, chill sunshine allotted 
to these parts by the weather-god of that 
year. 

For she loved, and it was for the first time. 

That the object of her beautiful passion 
was only a dull-witted child with a badly- 
shaped head and no gratitude in her heart, 
matters not. She was not only the first child 
Lily Drummond had ever loved, but literally 
the first human being. 

241 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

Her old French grandmother had been 
kind, and Lily had been kind by return to 
her, but for some reason the child had not 
loved the old woman. Drummond, she had 
respected, admired, liked and grown used 
to. Troumetskoi had taught her things and 
a part of her nature had responded to his, 
but that had been all. 

This little Sarah Walsh had brought her, 
in her grubby hands, the most wondrous 
thing in the world. 

Walsh had built himself a house in Cum- 
berland Grove, twenty minutes’ walk from 
the old minister’s house, and to this resi- 
dence Lily was invited, a few days after her 
frock-hunting expedition with Cuckoo. 

Yashmak Villa was built of yellow bricks; 
the windows were surrounded by a kind of 
conventional garland in red brick; there was 
an oriental turret, Tudor ramparts on a 
small scale and windows set in diamond 
panes. It was hideous and absurd, but it 
was suited to its neighbourhood and greatly 
242 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

admired there, so what did it matter what 
strangers might think of it? 

Walsh, himself its designer, was proud of 
it in his simple way. He was proud of the 
green satin furniture in the drawing-room,, 
of the gold-flecked dining-room walls, of the 
cumbrous, over-ornamented furniture that 
crowded the small rooms. Of its kind, and 
for his kind, it was a masterpiece. 

Cuckoo took her new aunt to see her room, 
and Lily, whose taste had of late suffered a 
reversion as to type, heartily approved the 
purply-pink bower with its glossy white fur- 
niture. 

There was a pineapple for lunch, among 
other things, and this pineapple obviously 
represented the flower of dietary imagina- 
tion in Herbert Walsh. He beamed with 
pride as he urged his guest to have just a 
tiny bit more. “It comes from the West 
End,” he added wistfully; “I went on pur- 
pose to get it for you.” 

Cuckoo, attired in the frock Lily had given 
243 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

her and the pink socks and white shoes that 
“went with it,” was as beauteous as the day, 
with her hair done in lumpy curls tied over 
her ear with a pink bow, and did the honours 
in a way that enchanted her victim. 

“Oh, Mr. Walsh,” Lily said later, when 
Cuckoo had left the room for a moment, 
“how lucky you are to have such a little an- 
gel." 

“Yes, I am very grateful,” he answered; 
“it’s a pity the Lord did not see fit to bless 
you and Samuel. However, He knew best.” 

Lily bowed her head gently. “Yes, He 
knew best. Is that Peggy?” 

“Yes, that’s the wife. Done from a pho- 
tograph — a very good likeness.” 

The late Mrs. Walsh, in a large oil paint- 
ing, stood by a marble-topped table, one hand 
on a vase of roses. She wore a blue frock, 
and a gold locket on a chain hung round her 
neck. A pretty woman, in a way, with too 
little chin. 

“Poor Peggy,” sighed the widower. 
“Seemed as if I couldn’t bear it when she 

244 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

was took. But I could , you see. ’E never 
makes a mistake." 

This visit was repeated several times, and 
nearly every day Cuckoo came to Zion Villa. 

Lily bought books and gave the child little 
tentative lessons, half afraid of betraying 
her own ignorance. She used also to take 
Cuckoo driving, an amusement thoroughly 
appreciated by that young lady. 

Old Mrs. Drummond approved of her 
daughter-in-law's devotion to her grand- 
child, and more than once expressed her opin- 
ion that Lily would probably leave money 
to poor little Sarah. To this Lily said noth- 
ing. She had, after all, continued to use 
the money she had had in the Paris Bank 
at the time of her coming to England, but 
she had not the remotest idea how much she 
had left. She had never written to Trou- 
metskoi, nor he to her. She knew nothing 
of what he had done regarding the house 
or her belongings. There lay between Mrs. 
Samuel Drummond, of Clapham, and Ma- 
dame de Faid'herbe, of Paris, an abyss too 
245 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

wide and deep for bridging. Under 
Cuckoo's absolute sway, moreover, the late 
Madame de Faid'herbe had but little time for 
thinking of her past. Her two lives were 
so distinct as to seem utterly irreconcilable 
to each other. She was two separate 
women, or rather she had been one woman 
and was now another. 

The regular chapel-going habits into 
which she had again fallen, helped this illu- 
sion. More than once as she sat in her 
hard, cushionless place, listening to Mr. 
Drummond's successor, she deliberately tried 
to reinvisage her life in Paris. She recalled 
to mind her house, her clothes, her day's 
routine, Troumetskoi. She forced her mem- 
ory to review these things, but they came 
before her as shadowy and unreal as projec- 
tions from a magic lantern, and she gave 
up with a sigh of relief and fell once more 
to studying the bored little face of the child 
she loved. 

As for Cuckoo, she had her good qualities. 
She had at least the gratitude of the vain 
246 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

woman for those who feed her vanity. 
Auntie Lily thought her beautiful and good 
and clever, and this was nice of Auntie Lily. 
Cuckoo loved fine clothes, and Auntie Lily 
gave them to her. Cuckoo loved chocolates 
and there was always a store of these messy 
dainties in the dressing-table drawer up- 
stairs. Also when Cuckoo told little lies and 
Grandma Drummond related to her awful 
stories about ’ell, Auntie Lily comforted the 
criminal, and felt (once safely out of grand- 
ma’s hearing) quite sure the dear Lord 
would forgive such a sweet little girl. 

Not a bad child, Cuckoo possessed, or was 
possessed by, an arid, cold nature and was 
destined to grow into a selfish, hard woman. 
In the meantime the graces of even unlovely 
childhood were hers, and in the warming 
influence of Lily’s passion, they expanded 
and flaunted. 

Walsh passed a wonderful summer, half 
in Heaven, half in a place of torture unspeak- 
able. He glowed and trembled in Lily’s 
presence, his honest heart lay in an agony 
247 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

of humility at her little indifferent feet. But 
she did not see. 

And thus more atoms of time were added 
to the great whole of eternity, and autumn 
came. 

September was a rainy month, and, to add 
to its sadness, Cuckoo went to beautiful, 
bracing, breezy Bexhill to visit her paternal 
grandmother. She was to be gone only a 
fortnight, but before a week had passed Lily 
was miserable. 

By this time the old minister was well 
enough to go to chapel occasionally in his 
old capacity, and his faithful congregation 
saw with joy that his power of anathema had 
not waned. 

Even Lily admired his purple invective, 
and wondered innocently that such an old 
saint should know so much about Hell. 

There were several tea parties given by 
ladies of the connexion in honour of the pas- 
tor’s recovery and to these wild festivities 
Lily accompanied her parents-in-law as a 
matter of course. She had long since been 
248 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

accepted by them as an integral part of their 
lives. She was Samuel’s widow, so of 
course she lived with them. They were 
fond of the gentle little creature, but she had 
lost her novelty and they took her now as a 
matter of course — in which line of reason- 
ing she thoroughly concurred with them. 
She did not reason with herself on the sub- 
ject or make deliberate plans. She was liv- 
ing in Clapham, that was all. And then — 
there was Cuckoo. 

One day in the second week in September, 
when Cuckoo had been away six days, some- 
thing happened. 


249 


XXXII 


It had rained hard all the morning and now, 
at 3 o’clock, the low sky had cracked across 
and a light, not to be called sunlight, but still 
something brighter than it had shown for 
days, filtered down on Clapham. 

Old Mrs. Drummond had been making 
calf’s foot jelly for a sick friend, and now, 
finding Lily doing nothing in the drawing- 
room, sent her daughter to the invalid’s house 
with a jar of the sticky delicacy. 

Lily was glad to go out. She was very 
lonely and felt a vague restlessness that re- 
minded her of the old Mission days. She 
wanted to do something — anything, she did 
not know what. And the walk would do 
her good. 

She went on her way, light-footed and 
graceful, something in her unconscious bear- 
ing attracting many glances as she went. 
250 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

Sister Broadbent was very grateful for the 
jelly, and the new baby was brought in for 
the guest’s delectation. 

It was wrapped in flannel, which Lily 
loathed; it was of a deep mulberry hue and 
looked unfinished; its nose was absurd; its 
bald head, with a palpitating spot in the mid- 
dle, gave Lily a queer, sick qualm. When 
she had paid the necessary compliments and 
made her adieux, Lily stood for a moment 
at the door looking at the sky. 

“No,” she said, under her breath, “I do 
not like them ; I don’t like them at all. And 
I should hate to have one. It isn’t that at 
all — what Mother Drummond said — that 
that’s why I love Cuckoo so much. It’s — 
it’s just because she’s Cuckoo. If I could 
have one of her age, perhaps — Ugh!” 

At the thought of the pulpy fragment of 
humanity she had just held in her unwilling 
arms, she gave a little shudder and walked 
on. 

At the corner she ran into Herbert Walsh. 

“You!” he cried. “I was just on my way 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

to see you. I've a letter from Cuckoo* I 
thought perhaps — " 

“Oh, yes, give it to me, let me see it," 
she interrupted vaguely, paying no heed 
to his outstretched hand; “let me see it, 
please." 

The letter, written on a small sheet with 
an elegant design in the corner, of cranes 
flying across an angry sunset, was short: 

“Dear Father: 

“I hope you are well. I am well. 
Grandma Hicks is well. There is a cat 
heer. Is name is Mareo. The cook's name 
is Iserbel. We had veel for dinner. I like 
veel. Grandma has a new front with grey 
in it. She gave me some beads. We went 
to Chapel and I sang all the hims. Iserbel 
says I sing lovely. Please give my love to 
Granpa and Grandma Drummond and to 
Auntie Lily. Auntie Lily is going to give 
me a lace collar. 

“Your loving little girl, 

“Cuckoo." 


252 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

"Oh,” said Lily softly. The letter, to her, 
was beautiful. And to Walsh all the light 
in the world came from her soft eyes as she 
looked up at him. 

"I have just seen Sister Broadbent’s new 
baby,” she went on innocently, when she had 
given him back the letter. He flushed a 
deep scarlet. "What is the matter, Her- 
bert?” she asked. 

They had reached Zion Villa, and stood 
alone in the little weather-wrecked garden. 
Walsh looked at her, something in his throat 
preventing him speaking for a moment. 
Then he stammered — 

"The matter ?” 

"Yes — you — you looked so queer.” 

Again he blushed. "I — I was just think- 
ing. Tell me about Sister Broadbent’s 
baby. Is it a nice one?” 

Lily laughed. "No — at least to me they 
are never nice. They are so very ugly.” 

If she had suddenly knocked him down he 
could not have been more amazed, more ap- 
palled. 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

“Lily!” he faltered. 

Something in his tone reminded her of 
Samuel, and she felt rebuked. 

“Don't be shocked,” she pleaded. “I 
don't mean to be wicked. It is only the very 
little ones that I — I don’t like. You knozu 
how I love Cuckoo.” 

There was a short pause, and then he said 
gently, “Lily, I — I don't know 'ow to say it — 
if you think it is preshuming, I dare say it 
is, but — you do love Cuckoo, I know, and 
I — oh, Lily, won't you take us — Cuckoo and 
me?” 

It had never occurred to her that she 
might marry the man and thus have the 
child for her own. Even now she did not 
understand for a moment. Then, slowly, 
his meaning penetrated to her brain. 

“Take you? You mean marry you?” 

He was very white now and beads of 
sweat shone on his forehead. 

“Yes, marry me. Oh, Lily, marry me, 
my dear. I'll be good to you.” 

But what he might do did not matter much 
254 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

to her. The intoxicating idea that Cuckoo 
might be hers had set her heart beating at 
least as hard as his. 

“Why, Herbert, — I — I never thought of 
that," she faltered. 

“Say yes, Lily; do say yes, my — my dear." 
Then he added, with simple craft, “Then 
you’d always have ’er with you. Will you?" 

It was raining again now, but neither of 
them noticed it, and if umbrellas have a lan- 
guage of their own, these two closed ones 
may have exchanged remarks on the sub- 
ject. 

“Do you think she would like me to?" 
Lily asked. 

“Like it? Of course she would. Like 
it? Oh, Lily!" 

Lily looked up at him. “Why, it’s rain- 
ing," she said, with a sudden outburst of her 
pretty laugh. “Let’s go in." 

“But will you?" he persisted, as they ran 
up the path. 

At the door she stopped. “Of course I 
will," she said. 


255 


XXXIII 


The engagement caused some commotion 
in the connexion. Walsh was a prosperous 
man, a pious man and he was very nearly a 
handsome man. He had been dreamed 
about on more than one virgin pillow. 

Even amongst the unco’ godly, such 
things as envy and malice may flourish and 
one assumes that at tea parties and else- 
where, poor Lily was not treated with per- 
fect kindness. She was a stranger, she was 
very pretty and there was a something about 
’er clothes. However, no one suspected the 
truth about her. She was, in spite of every- 
thing, poor Sam Drummond’s widow, and 
her behaviour in Clapham had been unex- 
ceptionable. Thus the animus against her 
was perforce reduced in its expression to 
fears for dear Brother Walsh’s ultimate 
happiness. 


256 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

Meantime, Brother Walsh soared among 
the angels in his bliss. Cuckoo, too, was 
much pleased and Lily herself quite happy. 

A visitor of old Mrs. Drummond who 
lived in the North somewhere, fell at this 
time and broke an ancient leg, and as Mrs. 
Drummond was obliged to go and look after 
her and it promised, at the best, to be a long 
job, the wedding was not to take place until 
the late winter, so that Lily could devote her- 
self entirely to her father-in-law. Walsh 
was disappointed, but he was too unselfish to 
murmur against what he saw to be a per- 
fectly just arrangement and Lily was de- 
lighted by the delay. 

Every day Cuckoo came to her and pres- 
ently, as the ladies of the connexion became 
used to the idea that Walsh was really lost 
beyond recall, they began to like Lily and she 
found herself making friends. 

She had joined two sewing societies; she 
went to lectures on sacred subjects, and lis- 
tened vaguely to the wisdom thus poured out 
by various brethren; she visited the sick — 

257 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

whom she intensely disliked, but who be- 
lieved themselves to be delightful to her — 
she learned to handle babies without shrink- 
ing; she grew fond of her future husband, 
and to submit to his shy and awkward love- 
making was easy to her; he was very like 
Samuel, only infinitely gentler. She was 
not only not bored, she was decidedly 
happy. 

That she ought to tell Walsh about her 
life in Paris, never even entered her head. 
She rarely thought of that life, and when 
she did it was much as she might have 
thought of a far-off dream. She did not 
miss it, but she felt not the least remorse re- 
garding it. She had not felt wicked while 
she was leading it ; she did not feel wicked in 
recalling it. It was simply another life, a 
life in which Herbert Walsh had no concern. 

Meantime the autumn had passed and the 
winter drew to a close. 

One day in February, when she had been 
to Oxford Street to do some shopping for 
her still absent mother-in-law, Lily decided 
258 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

to walk down Bond Street and see, as she 
mentally put it, the pretty things in the 
shops. The day was mild and she enjoyed 
loitering along, looking now at the well- 
dressed crowd, now at the windows. She 
herself wore a coat and skirt that had lost 
its freshness, yet bore plainly the mark of 
former glories. 

In Clapham she was, even now, remark- 
able for her elegance. Suddenly, at the cor- 
ner of Grafton Street, she became dowdy. 
She stood staring at herself in a mirror in 
one of the shop windows and dismay smote 
her. What a frump she looked! Her hat, 
too, was a disgrace. 

Almost running, she fled from the great 
street, to find herself, breathless and 
ashamed, in the quiet of Dover Street. 

“I must get a hat at once,” she whispered 
to herself. And as she spoke her eyes fell 
on a large, gold-lettered word that hung on 
a quiet-looking Georgian door. Chose! 
Chose in London! For a moment she 
seemed to be dreaming and back in Paris. 
259 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

Then she realised that the great man has a 
London house and that here it was. 

Timidly, ashamed of her clothes, she went 
in and stood by the door, looking round the 
great empty room. 

It was early, and only one lady was there 
— a fat lady ordering a replica of a frock in 
which a thin and willowy mannequin was 
walking up and down before her. Lily 
smiled, it seemed so familiar. 

Then a very grand gentleman, with vio- 
lets in his buttonhole, came forward and 
asked her wherein he could serve her. His 
coat was beautiful and his manner reminded 
her of Serge. 

“I want a hat,” she stammered. 

“Certainly, Madame, will you kindly sit 
down?” Then he walked away and spoke 
to a lady in black. The lady gave a little 
laugh as she saw the new client, but as she 
approached her manner changed and, after 
a moment’s hesitation, she burst out in 
French: “Ah, but it is Madame de Faid- 
’herbe!” 


260 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

Lily grew inches at the words and her eye- 
brows arched slightly. She threw back her 
head. 

“But perfectly/’ she returned in French. 
“Of course I am Madame de Faid’herbe. 
And you — how do you do, Alphonsine ?” 

The fat client and the three mannequins 
turned and watched; the gentleman in the 
beautiful coat returned; two more ladies 
joined the group, full of offers of assistance 
in the great matter of Lily’s hat. 

Mr. Cecil, informed at a short distance 
away by Mdlle. Alphonsine that Lily was 
very well known, very successful, the friend 
of a fabulously rich Russian nobleman, and 
an excellent client of the Paris house, re- 
turned and talked quite charmingly of the 
weather. 

Lily nodded gravely. Yes, it was very 
bad, the weather. “No, that hat is exe- 
crable, my good Alphonsine. Good enough 
for the English, no doubt, but — ” 

Mr. Cecil was crushed. 

Lily was clever enough to give no expla- 
261 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

nation whatever of her shabby clothes, and 
also to remove her gloves and show the rings 
that she was, luckily, wearing. She bought 
a beautiful frock, which she was able to 
wear as it was; a hat which, Alphonsine 
assured her, was the very last screech in 
Paris, and a set of silver fox furs. 

Then she said calmly, “I will send you my 
cheque to-morrow,” . and sailed out of the 
house. 

Mr. Cecil was uneasy, but Mdlle. Alphon- 
sine, to whose Gallic he had long since sur- 
rendered, laughed at him and “bet him ’alf 
a sovereign” that the cheque would come 
next day, — which, incidentally, it did. 


12 62 


XXXIV 


It was not yet noon when she left the great 
artist's and Bond Street drew her back. For 
an hour she sauntered along, thoroughly en- 
joying herself. The day was one of those 
mildly beautiful ones that from their rarity 
in our winters affect us poor Britons as wine 
affects a man dying of thirst. 

Remarks on the fine day were heard on all 
sides: “Better than the Riviera this, what?" 
Or : “Glorious to see the sun, eh ?” It made 
Lily laugh, she who knew the real sun and 
what he could do when he liked. 

“Nearly warm enough for the river," one 
youth declared to a girl he was evidently 
pretending to have met by accident. 

People joined each other and walked on in 
friendly communion that an ordinary bleak 
February morning would have longed in 
vain to see. The pallid sunshine seemed to 
263 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

bring out qualities of geniality, of kind- 
ness, of sentiment, even. 

For some time Lily walked behind a well- 
set-up, middle-aged man of military aspect, 
and a well-preserved, well-made-up woman 
in black. They had, apparently, not met for 
some time. 

“Dear me, dear me, can it be so long?” 
the man said, straightening his shoulders, 
and thereby shaking off a few years. “Yes, 
you are right. Poor old Simla! We had 
some good hours there. And you are living 
in town now?” 

Lily listened, unashamed. 

“Do I remember?” he continued after a 
pause. “Of course I do. And you? I 
thought you had forgotten it all. That last 
ride, the morning before I left? Ah, Mil- 
licent, — if I may still call you Millicent? — ” 
he sighed. But the back of his neck was 
fat and red. 

“He hasn’t thought of her for years,” Lily 
decided, unconsciously cynical in her gentle 
264 


Mrs, Drummond’s Vocation 

way; “it’s the sun and the mild air that make 
him sentimental.” 

Then the man said something that gave 
her an idea. The Ritz ! She had not known 
there was a Ritz in London. If they were 
going to lunch there, why should not she ? 

So the unconscious General Sir Frederick 
O’Neill (retired) and the Lady Kennerton 
were followed in their innocent little esca- 
pade by a person whose juxtaposition to 
them would, had they but known of it, out- 
raged them seriously. 

They secured a table by the window and 
Lily, still close on their heels, was given a 
tiny one just vacated by its permanent les- 
see, a member of the Russian Embassy. So 
this was the Ritz? 

The gorgeous decorations of the room 
impressed her profoundly. It was, she de- 
cided, almost better than the Paris one. 
Only Boldi was not there; she would miss 
him. 

The waiter took her order deferentially, 
265 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

for it was an order marked out not only by 
knowledge, but by discrimination, and the 
expatriated one heard not such French every 
day. Rapidly the room filled. The women, 
she decided, were older than those in Paris. 
Really young faces were rare, and the make- 
ups were less skilful, though they showed a 
wish on the part of their wearers that they 
should be taken for the real thing. The 
unearthly purple-red lips that gashed the 
faces of the ladies of Paris were not to be 
seen, nor the ashen cheeks, but very few 
faces were innocent of chemicals. 

“How pretty their voices are,” Lily 
thought admiringly, “and what beautiful 
men !” 

Many people glanced at her; some people 
stared; but she was quite undisturbed and 
ate her excellent lunch with thorough appre- 
ciation. Her white wine warmed her; she 
forgot Clapham. If Serge had come in and 
joined her she would hardly have been sur- 
prised. Poor Serge ! She wondered where 
he was. How kind he had been! And 
266 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

soon, soon it would be the spring. Her 
mind was so busy with thoughts of Paris, 
that when someone spoke her name, she 
looked up as composedly as if she had never 
left that wondrous city. 

“Madame de Faid'herbe !” 

It was young Cherringham, tall, beauti- 
ful, with, oh, such perfect clothes, and a gar- 
denia in his coat. He had always worn a 
gardenia. 

“How do you do?” she said quietly, smil- 
ing at him. 

“I could hardly believe my eyes,” he went 
on. “May I sit down? I didn't know you 
were in England.” 

“Oh, yes,” returned Lily; “I am here.” 

She was prettier than ever, he decided, 
and evidently prospering. 

“Have you been here long?” 

“Yes; I am with some old people, rela- 
tions, who are ill.” 

“Oh.” 

Old relations, who are ill, do not usually 
play a large role in the lives of ladies in 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

Lily’s position. He did not quite know what 
to say, and she went on before he spoke. 

“You have been to Paris again?” 

“I? Oh, yes. I was there at Christmas. 
Saw several of our old friends.” 

Lily poiired out more wine. “Did you 
meet Serge?” she enquired serenely. 

“Troumetskoi? No, — he wasn’t there. 
Someone said he was in Russia — but — I 
mean to say — ” 

She wondered at his confusion. “I hope 
he is quite well and happy,” she said. “He 
is such a very nice man.” 

Cherringham had heard that they had 
parted, but that was all. People are not 
long remembered in that particular society. 

“I — I saw Jules d’Herblay,” he resumed, 
after a short pause. “He asked if I had 
seen you.” 

“Ah. Ce brave Jules! And he is well?” 

“He’s well now. He had a bad go of 
fever in the autumn, I believe. He has got 
quite thin. Someone told me he had been 
hard hit in some love affair,” went on the 
268 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

young diplomat diplomatically, “but it may 
not be true/’ 

“Probably/’ she agreed. 

A moment later Cherringham’s party ar- 
rived and he bade Lily a hasty adieu. 

“Will you dine with me?” he asked, hold- 
ing her hand tenderly. 

She shook her head. “I will think and 
let you know. I am very busy with my old 
gentleman — ” 

She took his card, smiled at him and he 
left her. When she had had coffee, she 
threaded her way through the crowd of 
tables and left the hotel. 

It was still sunny. Where should she go 
now? She took a taxi and drove through 
St. James’s Park. But St. James’s Park is 
not the Bois, particularly in February. 

Suddenly, in the middle of her drive, Paris 
died and Clapham came to life again. 

By half-past four she was going in at the 
gate of Zion Villa. 


269 


XXXV 


Spring came early down our way that year. 
Even March was less fierce than usual, and 
April crept quietly in, garlanded in delicate 
green. 

May was that most wonderful thing in 
the world, a real English spring, as sung 
by the old poets. 

In June, Lily was to be married. 

On the tenth of May she chanced to find 
the card young Geoffrey Cherringham had 
given her. She had never written to him, 
hardly thought of him. The door of Zion 
Villa closing on her that February afternoon 
had seemed to close also on her memories. 

She was again Mrs. Samuel Drummond, 
of Clapham, and Madame de Faid’herbe was 
— somebody else. But, on finding the card, 
something stirred in her. She would like to 
270 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

see him again, to smell his gardenia, to re- 
member Paris. 

The evening of the fourteenth of May, a 
beautiful little lady, clad all in white, was 
met in the Palm Court of the Carlton — oh, 
ghosts of all the beautiful ladies who have 
been met there, do you haunt it, I wonder ? — 
by a rather harassed youth with a small 
golden moustache. 

“At last!” he cried, of course. Why had 
she not given him a sign of life all this time? 
Why was she so cruel? And so on, and so 
on. 

Towards the middle of their excellent din- 
ner Lily asked him what the matter was. 

“The matter? Nothing. Nothing at 
all; I am — perfectly all right.” 

But a moment later when she had accepted 
his explanation and changed the subject, he 
returned to it. 

“Look here, Madame de Faid’herbe, I’ve 
got into the devihof a mess and I don’t know 
how to get out of it. I believe I’ll tell 
you.” 


271 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

The story was simple. The beautiful, 
joyous, immoral youth had been playing 
about with a girl and the girl had — hooked 
him. He had never dreamed of marrying 
her, wasn't in love with her at all, had never 
wanted to deceive her, and yet — the engage- 
ment was announced and he'd have to go 
through with it, and he was perfectly mis- 
erable. 

Lily was truly sorry for him but could 
suggest only one thing, that he should own 
up and ask to be let off. 

He shook his head. Then he went on to 
that part of his story that was to be of im- 
portance to his hearer. He recalled the joys 
of freedom, the beauty of being one's own 
master, the terrible tyranny of matrimony. 

“Oh, to think of the dear old days in 
Paris!" he moaned. “I was as happy as a 
king, damn it — I beg your pardon — and I 
don't believe I did a soul any harm." 

“I'm sure you didn’t, Mr. Cherringham," 
she agreed warmly. 

“And the worst of it is that she is rich," 
272 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

he pursued, dolefully, “and I, being nearly 
a pauper, she’ll expect to rule me. She’ll 
do it, too — she’s got one of those long chins 
— you know.” 

When they had moved to the Palm Court 
for their coffee he burst out again: 

“If I’d done any harm, you know, I could 
bear it better. But I didn’t. Just think of 
the larks we used to have in Paris, — I’ve 
eaten my last supper at the Cafe de Paris, 
and no more breakfasts at the Pre aux Cate- 
lans for this child. And the dear funny lit- 
tle theatres, the Boite a — what’s its name?” 

“Fursy,” supplemented Lily dreamily. 
His enthusiasm had carried her back to the 
old days. She, too, was giving them up for 
ever. For the first time she realised this: 
for the first time doubt stirred in her mind. 

“And you?” he asked, suddenly, struck by 
something in her face. “Don’t you ever get 
tired of — of your old relatives?” 

She did not answer. She was trying to 
visualise Cuckoo’s face, and she could not 
quite do it. 


273 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

After a pause, young Cherringham took 
from his pocket a letter and handed it to her. 

“By jove, I nearly forgot to give it to you. 
It's from d'Herblay. I wrote him that I had 
seen you and he sent you this, in my care, 
nearly three months ago; but that's not my 
fault." 

She looked idly at the envelope. “Thanks, 
Mr. Cherringham ; do you mind if I go now ? 
I am very tired." 

It was true, she was tired. He, who was 
cheering up after his third liqueur, urged her 
to stay, but she persisted gently, and he 
presently stood alone in the mild air, look- 
ing after her taxi. 

“Yashmak Villa, Cumberland Grove, 
Clapham! By God, Clapham!" he said 
aloud. 


XXXVI 


And the next day it rained. Walsh came to 
supper and he and Lily walked under a large 
umbrella to chapel. He was very happy. 
Her sudden appearance the evening before 
at his house, her clamouring to see the 
sleeping Cuckoo, the sudden burst of tears — 
the first he had ever seen her shed — these 
things had endeared her doubly to him. 
And then, against his conscience, he had ad- 
mired her evening frock. How lovely she 
was ! How beautiful her delicate white 
shoulders ! 

. “You will be glad to see Brother Pen- 
guin, he said, as she splashed ankle-deep in 
a puddle. “It will be a comfort to you to 
hear about the Mission.” 

She did not answer. 

“He has been very greatly blessed in his 
work,” he continued as they staggered 
275 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

against the wind at a street corner; “he will 
tell us to-night about it.” 

“Oh, what an awful night, Herbert!” 

His heart smote him. He should have 
got a cab for her. 

“Poor little dear,” he said, pressing her 
close to him, “I thought the rain was nearly 
over or you shouldn’t ’ave walked.” 

The chapel was crowded, and all the win- 
dows were carefully closed. Lily’s head 
ached and the smell of wet clothes did not 
help it. 

Old Mrs. Drummond had not come, but 
the old minister, now nearly restored to his 
usual health, was in his place and offered up 
a very long prayer. The singing was prob- 
ably no worse than usual, but to Lily it 
seemed almost unbearably bad. 

Herbert sang loudly, and she wondered 
if he always sang so much through his nose? 

Then at last Brother Penguin rose. He 
had changed but little; his scrubby beard 
was a little greyer, his bald head a little 
balder, but otherwise he was unaltered. 
276 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

Even his clothes seemed to be the same as 
he had worn in China. 

He talked for an hour, describing the 
work at the Mission, the number of con- 
verts, some recent troubles with the inmates 
of the Chinese City, a visitation made to the 
Mission of the dread cholera. To this, dear 
Mr. Brady had succumbed and the new min- 
ister, a young man, was greatly blessed in 
his efforts in the vineyard. 

Lily closed her eyes and saw it all. The 
blaze of summer, the bitter cold of winter, 
the narrow street down by the sea with its 
crowds of smelling celestials. 

She felt that by stretching out her hand 
she could have touched the corrugated iron 
chapel, that her ears were filled with the 
sound of the tinkling, jerking bell. 

The sitting-room of her own bungalow 
came before her, with its pictures, its few 
books, its rocking chair. Ah Fee came to- 
wards her with a smile on his soapy face. 
Samuel — surely Samuel was upstairs and 
would come down to her in a minute. 

277 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

And then — she found Brother Penguin, 
his face oily with the efforts of oratory, 
shaking her by the hand. The lecture was 
over, the lecturer holding an impromptu 
reception. He had brought her, it seemed, 
a wedding present, the united gift of the 
Mission ladies and gentlemen. He would 
bring it to Zion Villa the next day. Also — 
here his voice dropped into a key she quite 
unreasonably resented — he had brought her 
what he knew she would value, even at this 
joyful time. He had brought her some 
flowers cut from dear Brother Drummond's 
grave. 

Walsh was deeply touched by this deli- 
cate attention and Lily thanked Brother Pen- 
guin as warmly as she could. What, she 
was wondering, would Geoffrey Cherring- 
ham think of it? 

The rain had ceased and she walked home 
between her father-in-law and the man who 
was to be her husband in three weeks' 
time. 

When she was alone in her room she un- 
278 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

locked her dressing-table drawer and took 
from it d’Herblay’s letter. 

“Dear Madame,” it began respectfully. 
It ended as respectfully: “Your devoted 
Jules d’Herblay.” 

But in between came other things. 
Would she not see him? Cherringham 
had written that she was with her family. 
This was most praiseworthy. No one ap- 
preciated the value of family ties so much as 
he, d’Herblay. But surely it could not 
mean that Paris was to be deprived of her 
for ever? The city was in mourning for 
her. As for news, he had little or none. 
Her going had disorganised their little so- 
ciety. Troumetskoi was in Russia, chained, 
one said, to the Domestic Hearth. Apropos 
of Serge, it might interest Madame to know 
that he, d’Herblay, out of a sentiment, per- 
haps absurd but God knows how sincere, had 
acquired from the Russian the charming 
hotel near the Bois where Lily had so 
graciously reigned. The house stood 
empty now, but nothing in it had been dis- 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

turbed, not even the pair of long grey suede 
gloves that Lily had left on the table in the 
drawing-room. . . . Sometimes d'Her- 

blay went and spent an hour there. Ah, 
if the house was no longer empty ! If 
its former chatelaine were but back, how 
different life would be for this old Jules, 
no doubt merely ridiculous in her eyes! 
And would Madame de Faid’herbe not send 
this old Jules, her humble adorer, just a lit- 
tle word? His address was, etc. Might 
he not hope to see her again? 

From the room beneath came the sound of 
snoring; both the old people snored. 

Lily at last folded the letter, locked it 
away, and got into bed. The bed she real- 
ised, for the first time, was hard and lumpy. 
Ah, her broad comfortable bed at home! 
At home! 

For the first time since she had left Paris 
she thought of her house there by that name. 

“A letter for you, my dear." 

Old Mrs. Drummond bustled into the 

28a 


Mrs. Drummond’s Vocation 

room early the next morning. “From 
Paris.” 

The letter was from her Paris bankers, 
sent first to her house in Paris, thence ob- 
viously by d’Herblay to Cherringham, who 
had sent it to Yashmak Villa, whence it was 
now brought by Walsh on his way to busi- 
ness. It was a polite statement to the ef- 
fect that Madame de Faid’herbe had over- 
drawn her account to the amount of one 
hundred and seven francs. 

On the outside of the envelope d’Herblay 
had scrawled : “Do not forget me or my ad- 
dress, Jules.” 


XXXVII 


“ ’Ow is your ’eadache, my dear?” Old 
Mrs. Drummond stood by the hard sofa 
whereon Lily had been trying to rest, and 
held out a telegram to her. “This ’as just 
come. The boy’s waiting to see if there’s 
an answer.” 

Lily sat up and tore the envelope open with 
shaking fingers. She could hardly believe 
that it did not come from Paris. 

“Unable to get back to fetch you, but 
please join me at door St. James’s Hall, 
7:30, for big meeting. Dr. Pettigrew, just 
back from India, presides; fond love, Her- 
bert.” 

“Any answer?” asked the old lady, in- 
quisitively. 

“No; I must see how I feel. It’s from 
Herbert. You may read it.” 

282 


Mrs. Drummond's Vocation 

A few minutes later she rushed into 
Walsh's house, and, seizing Cuckoo in her 
arms, nearly hurt the child by the vehe- 
mence of her kisses. 

“ Auntie Lily, whatever is the matter?" 

“Oh, Cuckoo, Cuckoo," Lily moaned. 
“Love me, love me." 

Cuckoo preened herself. “Course I love 
you, only you're crushing my curls." 

Lily stared at her, then she laughed. 

It was raining when she reached her next 
destination and, pausing under a just lit 
street lamp, she took from her purse two bits 
of paper and looked at them. 

“43 Lombard Street, E. C.," she read 
aloud, “and 14, rue de l'Universite." 

Then she went into the telegraph office. 


[THE END 


283 







































































r A WARNING 


Now, to you whom this tale will with per- 
fect reason, startle and shock, a little word. 

I, who recount, do not approve of the tale 
any more than you do. I see the heroine as 
you see her, and in the interest of humanity 
Could wish her different. 

But in the interests of light literature I 
am glad that the story happened, for it is all 
true, and what is true is Life, and what is 
Life must interest even if it shocks. 

So here is an honest warning to those 
readers who do not wish to see the ugly side 
of things, who prefer idealism to verity and 
who “see no use in writing about horrid peo- 
pled 

Having said which 2 1 begin my tale. 







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